“I’ve been a bad man,” he continued with a sigh of regret, “and I suppose I’ll get my deserts where I’m going; but I know I shall deserve it all, whatever it may be.
“Have you written everything just as I’ve told you?” he asked again, anxiously, turning his sunken eyes upon the closely written sheets in her lap.
“Yes; I have everything correct, I think,” Editha answered, longing to know if that dreadful face was still glaring upon them, yet not daring to look.
“Then give me the pencil and hold the paper while I sign it. I want this business off my mind; then perhaps I’ll feel easier,” he said, eagerly, and holding out his thin hand for the pencil.
Editha placed it between his fingers, and then holding her books with the paper laid on them so that he could write, he laboriously scrawled beneath what she had already written:
“I swear that this is the living truth. John Loker.”
“Thank you,” Editha said, with a breath of relief, hastily folding the paper, and wondering where and how she should hide it from those fierce, restless eyes above her.
She ventured to flash one swift glance out of the corners of her eyes toward the window, and, to her intense relief, she found that there was nothing there.
Tom Drake had disappeared as silently and as suddenly as he had come.
But her heart instinctively told her that that was not the last of him.