“Undeceive yourself: I’ll have them though you never leave this room alive.”

More to give herself time to think than in any hope of moving him, she began to plead:

“Let me have them, Victor—let me go.”

Smiling darkly, he shook his head.

“The letters mean nothing to you. What good—?”

He interrupted impatiently: “I shall publish them.”

“Impossible—!”

“But I shall.”

Aghast, she protested: “You can’t mean that!”

“Why not? The world shall know your true reason for leaving me—that you were the mistress of another man—and who that man was!”