"Why do you ask? You seem to know already."
"I know what anonymous letters have told me, if that's what you mean. But I'm your husband and have a right to know from you. How does your condition come about, I ask you?"
I cannot say what impulse moved me at that moment unless it was the desire to make a clean breast and an end of everything, but, stepping to my desk, I took out of a drawer the letter which Price had intercepted and threw it on the table.
He took it up and read it, with the air of one to whom the contents were not news, and then asked how I came by it.
"It was taken out of the hands of a woman who was in the act of posting it," I said. "She confessed that it was one of a number of such letters which had been inspired, if not written, by your friend Alma."
"My friend Alma!"
"Yes, your friend Alma."
His face assumed a frightful expression and he said:
"So that's how it is to be, is it? In spite of the admission you have just made you wish to imply that this" (holding out the letter) "is a trumped-up affair, and that Alma is at the bottom of it. You're going to brazen it out, are you, and shelter your condition under your position as a married woman?"
I was so taken by surprise by this infamous suggestion that I could not speak to deny it, and my husband went on to say: