“I don’t understand you. What do you mean?”
“Suicide,” she answered in a low, hard voice, regarding me coldly, with a truly desperate look in her eyes.
“Come, come, Léonie,” I said quickly, “to talk like that is absurd.”
“No, it is not in the least absurd,” she protested, a heavy, serious look upon her face. “Like yourself, I am the victim of a vile conspiracy. This man has long sought to entrap me, and has, alas! now succeeded.”
“For what reason?”
She remained silent, as though doubting whether to tell me the whole truth. In a few moments, however, she made a sudden resolve.
“Because he wishes to marry me,” she answered briefly.
“And by holding this letter as a menace he now seeks to force you into a marriage that is distasteful?”
“Distasteful!” she echoed. “I hate and detest him! Rather than marry him I would prefer suicide.”
“Why?”