That her anonymous correspondent had not exaggerated when he declared the letters to be “wholly compromising,” she well knew. Indeed, at the recollection of some of the violent love passages they contained she shuddered. What would become of her, she wondered feverishly, if those passages, written in her handwriting, or Sir Stephen’s, were to become public property? Oh, how mad she had been to write such things, she exclaimed aloud. The one drop of comfort in her bitterness was the reflection that Henry no longer lived, that he would never know.

Henry!

As she spoke her husband’s name a strange thought flashed in upon her. The mystery of his suicide had never been fathomed, nor had she ever succeeded in puzzling out even a possible solution to the problem, and now, all at once—​—

Her brain began to work with extraordinary rapidity. During his lifetime he had often read her curtain lectures which had bored her almost to distraction—​he had never tired of impressing upon her his views regarding married women who carried on flirtations, and his opinion in general upon a wife’s duties to her husband. At first, when he had spoken thus, her conscience had cried aloud, and she had believed herself a hypocrite and not fit to be married to any honest man, seeing that she loved Stephen Lethbridge so madly.

Then, as time went on, she had succeeded in smothering her conscience by reminding herself that Henry had married her in reality against her will, therefore that she had a right to love Stephen if she chose. Later, she had gone a step further by cultivating the habit of analyzing her feelings calmly and dispassionately, and contrasting her lack of affection for her husband with her all-consuming passion for Sir Stephen, and more than once when so engaged she had secretly wondered what would happen to Henry, and for that matter to herself, should Henry by any terrible mishap discover her deep secret.

“I believe,” she recollected saying to herself once, “he would either kill Stephen and me, or end his own life.”

And now in a flash the thought had come to her—​could Henry have, by some means, become aware of her hypocrisy, of the mental double life she had been leading, and in a moment of frenzy at his sudden disillusionment deliberately have ended his existence? And if so, was it possible the writer of the anonymous letter she had just received had been the person to impart that information to her husband, presumably in the hope of extorting blackmail by threatening to make the facts public, and that Henry had in consequence taken his life?

A terrible thought, yet the longer she dwelt on it the more plausible the theory appeared to her to be. Quite likely, too, she reflected, that if this were so the scoundrel, foiled in his first attempt to extort payment for the letters, would presently make another attempt, but that before doing so he would let a reasonable period elapse.

This discovery, as she believed it to be, and the reflection that now she must either pay the sum demanded or stand disgraced before everybody she knew, drove her almost frantic. In her agony of mind she began to pace the room, trying in vain to evolve some means of escape from her unknown persecutor.

Then she began to ask herself whom she could consult, of whom she could take counsel? And again there was nobody. Had the matter been one of less delicacy, less secret, she knew several people, intimate friends others, to whom she would readily have unbosomed herself. But to admit to anyone, even her dearest friend, that she had virtually been carrying on an intrigue, even an harmless intrigue, while married, she felt would be impossible. Besides, would anybody, not excepting her dearest friend, believe the intrigue to have been harmless?