“You have seen your work,” she said. “Do you still persist in your innocence?”
He drew a deep, shivering breath and shrank away behind his desk, but did not answer.
Katherine followed him.
“Do you know how sick your wife is?”
“I heard your father say.”
“She is swinging over eternity by a mere thread.” Katherine leaned across the desk and her eyes gazed with an even greater fixity into his. “If the thread snaps, do you know who will have broken it?”
“Don’t! Don’t!” he begged.
“Her own husband,” Katherine went on relentlessly.
A cry of agony escaped him.
“You saw that old man in there bending over her,” she pursued, “trying with all his skill, with all his love, to save her—to save her from the peril you have plunged her into—and with never a bitter feeling against you in his heart. If she lives, it will be because of him. And yet that old man is ruined and has a blackened reputation. I ask you, do you know who ruined him?”