“Before——”
“Before I met your father! We were never really engaged. But he loved me, and I thought I cared for him. I wrote him letters—the foolish letters of an impulsive girl. These he has kept. I treated him badly, I know that! But I too have suffered. It has been the desire of my life to have those letters. Last night he called here. Before my face he burnt all but one! That he kept. The price of his returning it to me was my help—last night.”
“For what purpose?” Wolfenden asked. “What use did he propose to make of the Admiral’s papers if he succeeded in stealing them?”
She shook her head mournfully.
“I cannot tell. He answered me at first that he simply needed some statistics to complete a magazine article, and that Mr. C. himself had sent him here. If what you tell me of their importance is true, I have no doubt that he lied.”
“Why could he not go to the Admiral himself?”
Lady Deringham’s face was as pale as death, and she spoke with downcast head, her eyes fixed upon her clenched hands.
“At Cairo,” she said, “not long after my marriage, we all met. I was indiscreet, and your father was hot-headed and jealous. They quarrelled and fought, your father wounded him; he fired in the air. You understand now that he could not go direct to the Admiral.”
“I cannot understand,” he admitted, “why you listened to his proposal.”
“Wolfenden, I wanted that letter,” she said, her voice dying away in something like a moan. “It is not that I have anything more than folly to reproach myself with, but it was written—it was the only one—after my marriage. Just at first I was not very happy with your father. We had had a quarrel, I forget what about, and I sat down and wrote words which I have many a time bitterly repented ever having put on paper. I have never forgotten them—I never shall! I have seen them often in my happiest moments, and they have seemed to me to be written with letters of fire.”