“For days Hélène played with me as a cat does with a mouse, keeping me on tenter-hooks. But on the morning of the third I received a note from her, asking me to go and see her that night about eleven thirty, and saying that she had decided to return my letters. Overjoyed, I gladly kept the appointment, and she admitted me after I had given the signal agreed on. We went at once to the private office.
“Here are the letters,” she said, speaking in a low voice. “I return them to you freely. But first you must pledge me your word as an officer and a gentleman never to mention them to either my husband or Beatrice.”
“Of course, I willingly promised, and after a few words of thanks I left the house as silently as I had entered. I went directly to the Benedict, destroyed the letters, then on to the ball.”
“Good Heavens! did she not give you my message—my ring?” gasped Beatrice.
“No; neither of them.”
“Clever woman,” commented Mrs. Macallister. “She arranged it so you were in honor bound never to speak of the letters to Beatrice; and the latter, believing you false, would never refer to them either. Of course, she reckoned without the knowledge of your secret marriage. Mrs. Trevor was a shrewd judge of human nature. It was a pretty scheme she hatched to separate you two, and not get caught herself.”
“You have summed it up exactly, Mrs. Macallister,” agreed Gordon. “The first letter she showed Beatrice was probably one written years ago. I was bitterly hurt and angry, Beatrice, when you refused to speak to me at the hall. Then you returned my letter, unopened, which I wrote as soon as I heard of Mrs. Trevor’s death.
“I was much surprised, at being summoned as a witness at the inquest. But when the coroner showed me my signet ring, which you, my dearest, had said you would never part with, and told me it had been found in the dead woman’s hand, I was bewildered—horrified. I jumped to the conclusion that you two had met, quarreled and—God forgive me—” Gordon could not continue; and Beatrice, with shining eyes bent toward him.
“And so,” she said, “you took the crime upon yourself that I might be spared. It was noble of you, dear heart,” and before them all, she kissed him passionately.
Mrs. Macallister swallowed a suspicious lump in her throat, while Peggy buried her nose in a convenient pillow.