She clasped her hands pleadingly before her.
"I know that appearances are terribly against me!" she cried desperately. "I have no proof that I can bring forward in my own defense, but I am innocent. It is a hideous plot that they have concocted to deprive me of my honor, and to rob you of your money. If you will only help me, I am quite sure that we can find a way to prove how false it is."
He heaved a sigh that contained a note of relief.
"If I am to help you, and of course you know that if you are innocent I will do that to the expenditure of the last dollar that I possess in the world, you must answer my questions clearly and truthfully," he said, passing his hand across his brow wearily. "I shall not try to conceal from you how this has hurt me. It has stung my pride and pierced my heart. My wife is in bed under the shock of it all, for she has loved you as well as though you had been in reality her child. We must begin at the beginning and take matters as they came. Why were you in that house last night?"
"The woman, Liz, to whom I had been kind, sent for me!"
"And you went in the night without ordering the carriage? You went to that part of the city alone? Listen to me, Evelyn! You know how anxious I am to do for you anything that lies in my power, but I will not assist you in a lie, and that is one! You must tell the truth, if you expect anything from me in return."
"Then listen to me, and I will tell you the truth whatever the cost to myself. You know that I am not your child. I knew that fact. One day a man came to me—such a terrible man that no words could ever describe him to you. He told me that he was my father. He told me the most odious secret of my birth, and in my terror I allowed him to see that I knew little of my own antecedents, and that he could work upon my fears. It continued until I wrote him that first letter that you saw copied in the papers.
"Then I discovered that what he had said was a lie from the beginning. He had known my mother and knew the story of my adoption, determining to work upon that to extract money from me. I found it out in time, and forced him to admit that it was true. Then he forged the other letters that you saw printed. Last night I received a letter from his wife telling me that he had been arrested, and that she had found those letters. She offered to place them in my hands if I would go there for them, assuring me that she would not deliver them to a messenger for fear of their never reaching me. I went; you know the rest."
For a long time Leonard Chandler was silent.