The queries which hammered at his brain were swiftly swept aside by the one dominating fact. Her visit had not concerned Brewster, her lie had concealed no act of guilt or even indiscretion! What if—Great God! If he had made a hideous mistake——? But no! He had seen them together, she and her lover, in that very room not twenty-four hours before; had heard Brewster’s impassioned words, witnessed his act of devotion! Whatever motive had prompted her secret purchase of the trout stream, it was beside the point at issue. There must be proof in her desk, proof to augment and support the evidence of his own eyes.
He tore the drawers open one after another, scattering the neat piles of correspondence, social notes, cards of invitation, receipted bills, memoranda and household accounts—his feverish fingers sought in vain among them for a single line of an intimate or sentimental nature. But then, Leila would scarcely have kept secret love letters in an open desk. Somewhere in her apartments upstairs, perhaps, she had arranged a hiding place for them.
Then a swift remembrance came to him. The secret compartment! Back of the small drawer between the pigeon-holes on the desk top was a small space to which access could be had only by pressing a hidden knob. Leila had found it by accident one day and had been almost childishly delighted with her discovery.
Storm removed the drawer, pressed the spring, and the false back slid aside revealing two packets of letters. One was bound by a bit of white satin ribbon, yellowing now and slightly frayed; the other encircled with a rubber band.
The sight of them brought a grimace of triumph, to Storm’s lips, but it changed quickly as he tore the ribbon from the first packet. The letters were all postmarked prior to ten years ago and were in his handwriting—his own love letters, written during the period of their engagement and before. One end of the ribbon was knotted about a dried flower; an orange blossom! It must have been from her wedding bouquet.
A strange tightness constricted his throat, and he thrust the packet hastily aside. He did not want to be reminded at this hour of the happiness, the fool’s paradise in which he had lived before enlightenment came. No sentimentality about the past must be permitted to weaken his self-control now.
But the second packet, too, contained only his letters; those written since their marriage, mere notes of a most prosaic sort, some of them, sent to her during his infrequent absences from home and reminding her of trivial, every-day matters which required attention. The last, dated only a month before, concerned the reinstatement of MacWhirter, their ante-bellum gardener. Why had Leila kept every scrap of his handwriting as though she treasured it, as though it were precious to her?
For a long time he sat there staring at the scattered envelopes, the first vague, terrible stirring of doubt which had come when he read Jaffray’s letter returning again to torture his spirit. Then once more the scene of the previous night in that room arose in reassuring condemnation, and with a smothered oath he seized the letters and tore them viciously, the older packet with the rest, until nothing remained but a heap of infinitesimal scraps and the bit of yellowed ribbon.
He wanted them out of his sight, destroyed utterly, but where——? The fire in the kitchen range would have been banked for the night, but he could rake the coals aside. Sweeping the torn letters into a newspaper together with the ribbon, he made his way quietly to the kitchen. The range balked him at first. He strove vainly to coax a blaze from the livid coals, but with the aid of kindling wood and after much manipulation of the dampers he succeeded in producing a tiny flame. Upon this he thrust handfuls of the paper scraps, and when they caught and blazed up he thrust the ribbon deep among them.
How slowly they burned! The edges of the ribbon charred and it curled up, writhing like a living thing in agony. The flame was dying down, and Storm had turned frantically to the wood-box to pile on more fuel, when suddenly there came a grayish puff, a leaping tongue of fire, and the ribbon vanished, leaving only a heap of pale flakes against the darker, coarser ashes.