"Had you no suspicion of his guilt?"
She thought for a moment. "I confess I had," she said, after a pause, "but, you see, I had to put all such suspicions behind my back. If I had denounced Job, I thought he would have produced the bill and ruined Frank."
"I see. Well, here is the bill. No one knows of it but Heron, and he will say nothing. I thought of keeping it as a useful whip for your husband, should he treat you cruelly. But now that I find you do not care for him, I think it had better be destroyed."
"No," she said, putting it into her pocket, "I will keep it, to hold over Frank myself. I hate him, and would gladly divorce him--which I could easily do. But I am as proud of the family name as you are, and I do not want a scandal. So I shall not separate from him; but now I shall know how to make him behave himself." She tapped her pocket with a grim smile.
"Did you ever speak to him about the red pocket-book?"
"No, he never knew I had it. I put it away, and afterwards sent it up to the garret, where I thought it would be safe. Hardly anyone ever goes there but myself. Besides, if I had told Frank, he would have worried Job about giving him the bill, and Heaven only knows what would have happened then. No, I was wrong, I suppose, but I acted for the best. When Frank told me that he had seen you, and that the bill was in your possession, I went up to the garret, intending to find the pocket-book and destroy it. Then I was foolish enough to ask Ruth; she found it by chance--and--well, you know the rest."
"Yes, I know the rest," said Mr. Cass, grimly; "and, among other things. I know that Job Lovell killed Jenner, and that the dead man's unhappy wife has been punished all these years. Inez, I know you always hated her, but would you have let her lose her life?"
"No; if she had been in danger of that, I would have come forward and told all I knew, even at the cost of disgrace; I would not have had the blood of a fellow-creature on my soul. But, to tell you the truth, Sebastian, as Mrs. Jenner did not defend herself, I really believed she was guilty, and Job innocent. He confessed to having robbed Jenner; she would say nothing; so of the two, I thought Job the innocent one. Can you blame me?"
"Partly. I blame you for not having told me this long ago. I always suspected your husband. Now I know that he is innocent; and I should have known it all along, seeing that he was in the house--in my house--when the crime was committed. If you had spoken out, I would have managed to get Mrs. Jenner off in some way without exposing the whole of this dreadful story. Job should be punished."
"Think what that would mean to us all," said his sister, warningly.