“Sit there while I speak to you,” he said in a harsh and grating voice. “You have much to account to me for. Read that.”
He drew the anonymous letter from his pocket and flung it in her lap.
Like one dazed, she drew it from the envelope with trembling fingers, and very slowly, for her thoughts were in terrible confusion, mastered its accusing contents. Then she looked up at him with a face from which all the colour had fled, leaving it ghastly to look at.
“It is a lie,” she stammered in a voice scarcely above a whisper.
“It is the truth,” he thundered, “and you are as shameless in the hour of your detection as you have been in your career of fraud and deceit.”
“Prove it,” she cried faintly, still feebly trying to oppose his gathering anger.
“You have lived with me a good many years,” he said witheringly, “and yet you know so little of me as to think I should speak like that if I were not sure I was on firm ground. And yet perhaps you have some excuse. I have been a blind fool so long that you were justified in your hopes I should continue blind to the end. Well, that letter opened my eyes. Your fortunate absence gave me facilities that it might have been difficult to create. I have taken several of the most valuable articles in your collection and had them examined. Need I tell you the result? Your guilty face shows plainly enough that you need no telling.”
And then her faint efforts at bravado broke down.
“Forgive me,” she moaned. “I yielded in a moment of temptation. Many women have done the same; they were my own property after all,” she added with a feeble effort at self-justification.
That answer only provoked him the more. “A moment of temptation,” he repeated with scornful emphasis. “Rather many moments of temptation. This has been going on for years; these things were realized piece by piece. And now tell me—for I will have the truth out of you before you leave this room—where have these thousands gone, what have you got to show for them?”