“Have you a pencil and a piece of paper about you?” John Loker asked, after resting a few moments. “I want you to write down what I am going to tell you, and then I will sign it. It will be a strange ‘last will and testament,’” he added, with a bitter smile; “but perhaps it will do as much good as if I left a large fortune.”
Editha thought it would, too.
Yes, she had a pencil, and there was some paper in her French book that she had taken to write an exercise on and had not used. She produced these, and, using her books for a table, she was ready to write down the confession that would secure to her betrothed an unspotted name and place him where no man’s scorn would dare assail him.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
“I’ll give you a description of Tom Drake first, so you will not fail to know him if you should ever see him,” John Loker said, when Editha motioned him to begin.
“He’s a scamp, if there ever was one abroad in the world, and it would be a good thing for the public if he should yet have to serve a term of years somewhere.
“He is a tall, broad-shouldered, burly-looking man, with an ugly face on him, square, heavy jaws, and fierce black eyes.
“His hair is red, too—something you don’t often see with black eyes. There is a piece gone, too, from the lobe of his left ear, where he was once shot by a policeman, and came near losing his life. He has a scar under his right eye, and the little finger on his left hand is missing; that was done in blowing open a safe at one time.”
Editha did not think she could fail to know him after this description, and she already felt a sort of creeping horror in her veins as in her mind’s eye she saw this dreadful man.
“Well, miss,” the invalid continued, “about that robbery; we’d planned to do the thing—or, rather, he’d planned it all, and I was to help do the dirty work, a long, long time before we found a chance to carry it out. We’d got all the bearings, and knew just how every room in the house lay before we ever entered it.