Agnes replied:
"I never suspected it. My heart was too full of you. But Mr. Salter told me to-day that he unravelled it some time ago. Calvin Van de Lear showed him, in a moment of egotism, the conquest he had made over an unknown lady's affections, and passages of the correspondence. The keen old man immediately identified in the handwriting the person who addressed him a letter against us soon after his arrival in the East. But he did not tell me until to-day. How did you know she was the person?"
Andrew Zane blushed a little, and confessed:
"Agnes, she used to write to me. Seeing the anonymous letters you received, I knew the culprit instantly. It was that which precipitated the flight. She feared that her anonymous letters would result in her arrest and public trial for slander, as they would have done. The magistrate promised me that he would issue his warrant for every person who had employed the public mails to harass my wife, and when you entered this room my darker passions were again working to punish that woman and her paramour."
"Dearest, let them be forgotten. Yes, forgiven too. But poor Mr. Knox Van de Lear! They have stolen his savings and mortgaged his household furniture, which he was confiding enough to have put in his wife's name. That is also a part of the story related around the good pastor's grave."
"Calvin has not escaped," exclaimed Andrew Zane. "As long as that tigress accompanies him he has expiation to make. Voluptuous, jealous, restless, and, like a snake in the tightness of her folds and her noiseless approach, she will smother him with kisses and sell him to his enemies."
"Do you know her so well?" asked Agnes placidly.
"Very well. She was corrupt from childhood, but only a few of us knew it. She grew to be beautiful, and had the quickened intelligence which, for a while, accompanies ruined women: the unnatural sharpening of the duplicity, the firmer grasp on man as the animal, the study of the proprieties of life, and apparent impatience with all misbehavior. Her timid voice assisted her cunning as if with a natural gentleness, and invited onward the man who expected in her ample charms a bolder spirit. She betook herself to the church for penance, perhaps, but remained there for a character. My wife, if I have suffered, it was, perhaps, in part because for every sin is some punishment; that woman was my temptress also!"
His face was pale as he spoke these words, but he did not drop his eyes. The wife looked at him with a face also paled and startled.
"Remember," said Andrew Zane, "that I was a man."