“I can’t talk any more.” He put his hand upon my pulse.
“Your pulse is quite strong.”
“I am not,” I said shortly. I wished Ella would come back.
“You looked for them?” I did not answer.
“I am so sorry. Blundering fool that I am. You looked, and looked ... that is why you kept me at arm’s length, would not see me, wanted to be alone. You were searching. Why didn’t I think of it before? But how did I know she would come to you, confide in you?”
He was talking to himself now, seemed to forget me and my grave illness. “I might have thought of it though. From the first I pictured you two together. I have them. I took them ... didn’t you guess?” I forgot the extreme weakness of which I had complained, and caught hold of his coat sleeve, a little breathless.
“You took them ... stole them?”
“Yes. If you put it that way. Who had a better right? I knew everything. Her father, her people, nothing, or very little. And she had not wished them to know.”
“She was going to write the story, whatever it was; to publish it.”
“No! not immediately, not until long afterwards, not until it would hurt no one. They were in the writing-table drawer, the letters, in an elastic band. She was not tidy as a rule with papers, but these were tidy. The diary was bound in soft grey leather, and there were a few rough notes; loose, on MS. paper. You know all that happened there; the excitement was intense. How could I bear her papers, his letters, her notes to fall into strange hands. I was doing what she would wish, I knew I was carrying out her wishes. The day she ... she died I gathered them all together, slipped them into my greatcoat pocket; the car was at the door. I hurried away as if I had been a thief, the thief you are thinking me.”