"Are you sure that the world will applaud your real design? You hate the Wrandalls. Will they be charitable toward you when the truth is given out? Will Leslie applaud you? Listen, please: I am trying to save you from yourself, Sara. You will fail in everything you have hoped for. You will be more accursed than I. The world will pity me, it may even forgive me. It will listen to my story, which is more than you will do, and it will believe me. Ah, I am not afraid now. At first I was in terror. I had no hope of escape. All that is past. To-day I am ready to take my chances with the big, generous world. Men will try me, and men are not made of stone and steel. They punish but they do not avenge when they sit in jury boxes. They are not women! Good God, Sara, is there a man living to-day who could have planned this thing you have cherished all these months? Not one! And all men will curse you for it, even though they send me to prison or to the—chair. But they will not condemn me. They will hear my story and they will set me free. And then, what of you?"
Sara stood perfectly rigid, regarding this earnest reasoner with growing wonder.
"My dear," she said, "you would better be thinking of yourself, not of me."
"Why, when I tell my story, the world will hate you, Sara Wrandall. You have helped me, you have been good to me, no matter what sinister motive you may have had in doing so. It is my turn to help you."
"To help me!" cried Sara, astonished in spite of herself.
"Yes. To save you from execration—and even worse."
"There is no moral wrong in marriage with Leslie Wrandall," said Sara, returning to her own project.
"No moral wrong!" cried Hetty, aghast. "No, I suppose not," she went on, a moment later. "It is something much deeper, much blacker than moral wrong. There is no word for it. And if I marry him, what then? Wherein lies your triumph? You can't mean that—God in Heaven! You would not go to them with the truth when it was too late for him to—to cast me off!"
"I am no such fool as that. The secret would be for ever safe in that event. My triumph, as you call it, we will not discuss."
"How you must hate me, to be willing to do such an infamous thing to me!"