"Of course you do. But I wasn't going to print them before you'd seen them. Do you know what I'd meant to do with them—what in fact I did do with them? I left them to you in my will with directions that they weren't to be published without your consent. It seems a rather unusual bequest, but you know I had a conceited hope that some time they might be valuable. I don't know whether they would have sold for three thousand pounds—I admit it was a draft on posterity that posterity might have dishonoured—but I thought they might possibly go a little way towards paying my debt."
"Your debt? I don't understand." But the trembling of her mouth belied its words.
"Don't you? Don't you remember?"
"No, I don't. I never have remembered."
"Probably not. But you can hardly suppose that I've forgotten it."
"What has it to do with you, or me—or this?"
"Not much, perhaps; but still something, you'll admit."
"I admit nothing. I can't bear your ever having thought of it. I wish you hadn't told me. It spoils everything."
"Does it? Such a little thing? Surely a friend might be allowed to leave you a small legacy when he was decently dead? And it wasn't his fault, was it, if it paid a debt as well?"
The tears rose in her eyes to answer him.