The speaker's sneering assurance, his malignant emphasis on her husband's name, filled the measure of the wife's wrath full to overflowing. She advanced a step, raised her right arm, and with all her strength struck the palm of her hand across Dan's cheek.
"Liar!" she cried, savagely.
The man did not flinch under the blow. The eyes of the two clashed, and held steadily. Dan's cheek whitened where the stroke had fallen, then burned redly. It was the woman's gaze that dropped at last, and Dan smiled, cynically exultant.
"I don't ask you to believe me," he said impressively. "I only ask you to open your eyes to the truth. I suppose Jim would take pains to destroy any note from the woman, Jess. But there's always a chance. Men get careless when they have wives that are so very trusting." His sharp eyes perceived a lessening tension in the woman's form, a growing listlessness in the expression of her face. He knew that there had come a reaction from the strain of her emotions, that her will was growing impotent, that now, at last, she would be pliant to his purpose.
He strode to the desk, and drew out the letter-case, while Lou watched his every movement narrowly, as though she expected some trickery, while powerless further to combat him. Her loyalty to Jim was no less, but her powers of resistance had snapped. So, she looked on as Dan fumbled for a moment among the papers in the letter-case, and then held out to her the note that the woman had written in his room at the hotel, the night before.
Lou took it rather gropingly, in mechanical obedience, because of the utter weariness that was fallen upon her. She read it with eyes that were dimmed—and again. Then, she stood staring still at the page of coarse paper with its rudely scrawled lines, with its words of vile insinuation; but her gaze was unseeing. The man's voice came to her very faintly, as from a great distance.
"Well?"
"It's all a lie, of course," Lou said, feebly. "But I—don't understand."
The cynical exultation in Dan's smile grew. At last, he was bold enough to bring the affair to a crisis.
"Do you dare to ride with me to the town, to test the thing for yourself?"