She paused to draw off her gloves before replying, he watching her breathlessly. He placed a chair for her, but she motioned him aside and stood leaning against the mantel-shelf, as she had often seen him do in happier times. When she spoke, there was a repressed, nervous hoarseness in her tone that gave a sort of uncanny earnestness to her words.
"I have not come about Carlita," she said, "save incidentally. It is something connected with—you, with your own vital interests, that has tempted me to brave the censure of the world—to risk my reputation."
Leith smiled.
"It is not quite so bad as that," he said, soothingly. "My reputation is not so dreadful that your own is compromised by coming to my rooms."
"There isn't time to stand on trifles," she interrupted, dropping her arm from the mantel and going a step nearer to him. "Moments are precious, and yet I find it very difficult to say that which I must. You are standing in the most deadly peril! At any moment it may be too late to save yourself—and I have come to warn you!"
"What can you mean?" asked Leith, the smile fading.
"You are accused of the murder of Olney Winthrop!"
"I? Are you mad?"
"Heaven knows I wish I were, but it is too infamously true. Even now the detective, with an officer from Mexico, are here to arrest you and return you there. And the woman whom you have loved, the woman you would have made your wife, the woman in whose pretended illness you have shown such interest, is the person who has hatched the plot, who has bought your conviction, who has won the contempt and loathing of all men by promising to become your wife in order to betray you to the gallows!"