“It is curious that he should have trusted you—a perfect stranger,” she said, with coolness. “You did not explain the nature of your trust.”
“It was upon that very point, Mrs Olliffe, that I called to see you to-day,” I said. “Mr Arnold gave me a letter addressed to a certain Mr Alfred Dawnay, and—”
“To Alfred Dawnay!” she gasped, starting to her feet as all the colour faded from her face. “He wrote to him?” she cried. “Then—”
She stopped short, and with one hand clutching her breast, she grasped the edge of the table with the other, for she swayed, and would have fallen.
I saw that what I had told her revealed to her something of which she had never dreamed—something which upset all her previous calculations.
“Tell me, Mr Kemball,” she exclaimed at last, in a hard, strained voice, scarce above a whisper, “tell me—what did he write?”
“Ah! I do not know. I was merely the bearer of the letter.”
“You have no idea what Arnold told that man—what he revealed to him?”
“I have no knowledge of anything further than that, after Arnold’s death, I opened a packet, and found the letter addressed to Dawnay.”
“To Dawnay! His worst enemy and his—”