Norah's first weapon I saw had broken. I had never thought it a strong one. She could give Archie the comfort that she was not the trull he had judged her, she could not give him hope that she loved him. She could suppress a reason for not living, she could not make him want to live.
In the second round she held stronger cards. I saw her lips move, pleading with Archie's obstinacy. I could not hear the words. She was offering him a paper.
'But that's the letter I wrote to Lavater,' he cried. She nodded, her eyes dancing in the firelight.
'How on earth did you get it?'
The drum ceased abruptly. Silence swept up like a wave.
'Stole it,' said Norah, and told him how.
She had reached, she said, the Boma before sunset. Lavater, so Joseph told her, had been expected all the afternoon. If she cared to wait, he would be sure to look in at the office on his way home.
As she sat there, her mind worked ceaselessly on the cause she had come to fight, while her eyes darted nervously about the room. They were arrested by a familiar writing on the table in front of her. The blue envelope was addressed in Archie's hand.... It contained his confession.
Her brain leapt from perception to plan. Joseph she sent on an errand to the store. The moment he left the room, she seized a pen and scribbled a note of thanks for the milk and vegetables. This she slipped into the envelope that had contained the fatal letter. With the office gum she re-fastened the flap.
As she replaced it, Lavater's shadow crossed the window. She went to meet him with her heart beating noisily, she thought, against the stolen paper. She had come, she said, to ask leave to borrow some drugs from the Boma stores. And Lavater suspected nothing, but with expressions of concern found her the medicines.