"Can you not see?" exclaimed Felise impatiently. "Leslie Dane must be sacrificed to save us. He must be convicted by circumstantial evidence, and punished. Bonnibel is the only person who could prove his innocence. Let her keep out of the way and all will go well with us. Should she appear at the trial then discovery and ruin stare us in the face."
"But you forget, my dear, that Leslie Dane can prove his own alibi by the minister who married him that night, even though we could procure Bonnibel's silence."
Felise laughed heartlessly.
"Yes, he could, certainly, but the question is, would he? I am quite sure he would not."
"But why should he be silent when his life would most probably pay the forfeit?" exclaimed Mrs. Arnold, with a slight shudder.
"Mother, there are men who would die for an over-strained point of honor. From all that I can gather from his intercepted letters, Leslie Dane is precisely that sort of a man. He is a Southerner, you know—a Floridian. You have been in the South, and you know that its natives are proud, chivalrous, honorable to the highest degree! Well, he can have no means of knowing that Bonnibel is imprisoned by her husband—of course the proud old colonel will keep that fact a dead secret, and invent some plausible excuse for her retirement from society. The artist can therefore attribute her absence from the trial to but one thing."
"And that?" queried Mrs. Arnold.
"He will think that Bonnibel is silent because she would sooner sacrifice him than lose her prestige in society, and her brilliant position as the wife of Colonel Carlyle. He will scorn to betray her secret, and will go to his death with the self-sacrifice of a martyr."
"But suppose Colonel Carlyle should let Bonnibel go free? What then?"
Felise laughed softly.