"You've put it quite clearly," said Garrison. "You are offering to compromise. Very generous. Let me have the floor for half a minute. I've had your man Tuttle on your trail, when you thought you had him on mine, for some little time.
"I happen to know that you stole two necklaces in the keeping of Mrs. Fairfax, on the night I met you first, and placed them on the neck of some bold young woman in the house next door, where, as you may remember, I saw you dressed as Mephistopheles. You——"
"I stole nothing of the kind!" interrupted Theodore. "She's got them——"
"Never mind that," Garrison interposed. "Let's go on. You installed a 'phone in your closet, at the house in Ninety-third Street, and on the night when you overheard an appointment I made with Mrs. Fairfax, you plugged in, overheard it, abducted Dorothy, under the influence of chloroform, stole her wedding-certificate, and delivered me over to the hands of a pair of hired assassins to have me murdered in Central Park.
"All this, with the robbery you hired Tuttle to commit at Branchville, ought to keep you reflecting in prison for some little time to come—if you think you'd like to go to court and air your grievances publicly."
Theodore was intensely white. Yet his nerve was not entirely destroyed.
"All this won't save your bacon, when I turn over all my affidavits," he said. "The property won't go to you when the will's before the court. The man who married you in Rockbeach was no justice of the peace, and you know it, Mr. Jerold Garrison. You assumed the name of Fairfax and hired a low-down political heeler, who hadn't been a justice for fully five years, to act the part and marry you to Dorothy.
"I've got the affidavits. If you think that's going to sound well in public—if you think it's pleasant to Dorothy now to know what a blackguard you are, why let's get on the job, both of us flinging the mud!"
Dorothy was pale and tense with new excitement.
"Wait a minute, please," said Garrison. "You say you have legal affidavits that the man who performed that marriage ceremony was a fraud, paid to act the part?—that the marriage was a sham—no marriage at all?"