"And you did not tell me?"
She shook her head. "I'd never have told you."
"But the letter? What became of the letter?"
She had drawn a step away from him, not in any fresh spirit of evasion, but that she might gain a better view of the look with which he confronted her. Her eyes had not wavered from his since the first question he had asked, but her hands were nervously knotting and unknotting a silver cord which she had picked up from a jeweller's box upon the table at her side.
"Why didn't I get the letter, Laura?" he asked again.
"Because I burned it," she answered slowly, "I burned it in the fire in your room just before you came in—I burned it," she repeated for the third time, raising her voice to clearer distinctness.
A dark flush rose to his face and the sombre colour gave him an almost brutal look.
"In God's name why did you do it?" he asked; and she saw the contempt in his eyes as she had seen it before in her imagination. "I am to presume, I suppose, that you were prompted by jealousy?" he added. "An amiable beginning for a marriage."
"I don't know why I did it," she replied, in a voice which was so constrained as to sound unfeeling. "I didn't know at the time and I don't know now. Yes, I suppose jealousy is as good a reason as any other."
"And is this what I am to expect in the future?" he enquired, with an irony which he might as well have flung at a figure of wood. "Good God!" he exclaimed as his righteous resentment swept from his mind all recollection of his own relapses. "Are you willing to marry a man whom you can't trust out of your sight?"