`No!' she said.`Not yet! It seems that I owe a justification of my conduct to you.You shall stay and hear it.Or you shall stoop to the lowest infamy of all, and force your way out.'
It wrung my heart to see her; it wrung my heart to hear her.I answered by a sign -- it was all that I could do -- that I submitted myself to her will.
The crimson flush of anger began to fade out of her face, as I went back, and took my chair in silence.She waited a little, and steadied herself.
When she went on, but one sign of feeling was discernible in her.She spoke without looking at me.Her hands were fast clasped in her lap, and her eyes were fixed on the ground.
`I ought to have done you the common justice to explain myself,' she said, repeating my own words.`You shall see whether I did try to do you justice, or not.I told you just now that I never slept, and never returned to my bed, after you had left my sitting-room.It's useless to trouble you by dwelling on what I thought -- you would not understand my thoughts -- I will only tell you what I did, when time enough had passed to help me to recover myself.I refrained from alarming the house, and telling everybody what had happened -- as I ought to have done.In spite of what I had seen, I was fond enough of you to believe -- no matter what! -- any impossibility, rather than admit it to my own mind that you were deliberately a thief.I thought and thought -- and I ended in writing to you.'
`I never received the letter.'
`I know you never received it.Wait a little, and you shall hear why.
My letter would have told you nothing openly.It would not have ruined you for life, if it had fallen into some other person's hands.It would only have said -- in a manner which you yourself could not possibly have mistaken -- that I had reason to know you were in debt, and that it was in my experience and in my mother's experience of you, that you were not very discreet or very scrupulous about how you got money when you wanted it.You would have remembered the visit of the French lawyer, and you would have known what I referred to.If you had read on with some interest after that, you would have come to an offer I had to make to you -- the offer, privately (not a word, mind, to be said openly about it between us!), of the loan of as large a sum of money as I could get.-- And I would have got it!' she exclaimed, her colour beginning to rise again, and her eyes looking up at me once more.`I would have pledged the Diamond myself, if I could have got the money in no other way! In those words I wrote to you.
Wait! I did more than that.I arranged with Penelope to give you the letter when nobody was near.I planned to shut myself into my bedroom, and to have the sitting-room left open and empty all the morning.And I hoped -- with all my heart and soul I hoped! -- that you would take the opportunity, and put the Diamond back secretly in the drawer.'
I attempted to speak.She lifted her hand impatiently, and stopped me.
In the rapid alternations of her temper, her anger was beginning to rise again.She got up from her chair, and approached me.
`I know what you are going to say,' she went on.`You are going to remind me again that you never received my letter.I can tell you why.I tore it up.'
`For what reason?' I asked.
`For the best of reasons.I preferred tearing it up to throwing it away upon such a man as you! What was the first news that reached me in the morning? Just as my little plan was complete, what did I hear? I heard that you -- you!!! -- were the foremost person in the house in fetching the police.You were the active man; you were the leader; you were working harder than any of them to recover the jewel! You even carried your audacity far enough to ask to speak to me about the loss of the Diamond --the Diamond which you yourself had stolen; the Diamond which was all the time in your own hands! After that proof of your horrible falseness and cunning, I tore up my letter.But even then -- even when I was maddened by the searching and questioning of the policeman, whom you had sent in -- even then, there was some infatuation in my mind which wouldn't let me give you up.I said to myself, "He has played his vile farce before everybody else in the house.Let him try if he can play it before me."Somebody told me you were on the terrace.I went down to the terrace.Iforced myself to look at you; I forced myself to speak to you.Have you forgotten what I said?'
I might have answered that I remembered every word of it.But what purpose, at that moment, would the answer have served?