"Some one who is dead?" she repeated bewildered. The picture her fancy had painted was fading out. "Then how—"
"The old letter has fallen into unfriendly hands."
"And it must come back to hurt you—to spoil your life now! Something written before I was born! It sha'n't! It sha'n't!" She spoke with passionate abandon, her words struck out like fire from flint, from the horror of the knowledge that had sprung to her at sight of the gleaming thing at which she had snatched. "But you can pay the price, no matter how much it is! Take my pearls—my rings—my gowns."
He shook his head. "It's not money: what I am asked to pay is my honour. I am required to alter my judicial decision on the Welles-Scott case ... to hand down a legal lie."
She looked at him with parted lips. "The Welles-Scott case!"
"Yes. Much hangs on this decision. The great corporate interests—but you would not understand."
She threw herself beside his chair and knelt close to him. A great compassion was welling up in her, mingling itself with deep anger at the cowardly attack upon him. She had known of such conscienceless warfare in political life—acts of "character assassins" which knew neither pity nor honourable scruple. "Who has the letter?" she asked.
"Cameron Craig. It came with his card."
She started violently. Cameron Craig! He who had once asked her to marry him, who had asserted his love for her—he, now bent on her father's ruin! She had a darting memory of that heavy, ruthless jaw, those lowering, determined eyes. Cameron Craig? She lifted a stricken face.
"You see!" he said. "I remember you once said to me that he was not 'one of us.' He isn't. That is why I know that he will stop at nothing. He will do what he threatens. There is no way out."