“What a fool I am!” he cried, “to listen to such base lies, such malicious charges against the purest woman whom God ever sent to bless a man!”
And he angrily crumpled up the letter, and threw it into the empty fireplace, saying:
“I will forget having read it. I will not soil my mind by letting it dwell upon such turpitude!”
He said this, and he thought it; but, for all that, he could not open the rest of his letters. The anonymous missive stood before his eyes in letters of fire, and drove every other thought from his mind.
That penetrating, clinging, all-corroding worm, suspicion, had taken possession of his soul; and as he leaned over his desk, with his face buried in his hands, thinking over many things which had lately occurred, insignificant at the time, but fearfully ominous now, this unwillingly admitted germ of suspicion grew and expanded until it became certainty.
But, resolved that he would not think of his wife in connection with so vile a deed, he imagined a thousand wild excuses for the mischief-maker who took this mode of annoying him; of course there was no truth in his assertions, but from curiosity he would like to know who had written it. And yet suppose——
“Merciful God! can it be true?” he wildly cried, as the idea of his wife’s guilt would obstinately return to his troubled mind.
Thinking that the writing might throw some light on the mystery, he started up and tremblingly picked the fatal letter out of the ashes. Carefully smoothing it out, he laid it on his desk, and studied the heavy strokes, light strokes, and capitals of every word.
“It must be from some of my clerks,” he finally said, “someone who is angry with me for refusing to raise his salary; or perhaps it is the one that I dismissed the other day.”
Clinging to this idea, he thought over all the young men in his bank; but not one could he believe capable of resorting to so base a vengeance.