“I think you must be ill, dear,” he said, looking at her solicitously.
She tried to keep the tears from her voice. “I shall be, unless you tell me the truth.”
Douglas Briggs kept his eyes on her for a long time. She turned from him. “Do you mean that you want to know whether I am an honest man or not?” he asked, in a low voice.
“I have never questioned your honesty, Douglas.”
He hesitated. “I will tell you the truth,” he said, as if he had just passed through a struggle. “Last year I must have spent nearly thirty thousand dollars. It was all I had. At the end of the year I was five thousand dollars in debt. That has since been paid.”
“How did you make that money?” she asked, facing him.
Briggs looked down at the table. His eyes wandered over his papers and over the black scrapbook. “That’s a cruel question for a wife to ask her husband,” he remarked at last.
“Not when she knows he will be able to answer it,” Helen said, firmly.
“Well, I—I made it mostly through my law practice.”
Helen began to breathe quickly. “But I heard you say the other day that since you came to Washington you had been forced to give up your practice.”