She wouldn’t hear of it.  “Oh, Bernard, have I not learned to trust you yet?  Put away those papers.  There is only one thing I want to know.  Who gave them to you?  The Rector?”

“No.”

“How did they reach you, then?”

“Through Father Benwell.”

She started at that name like a woman electrified.

“I knew it!” she cried.  “It is the priest who has wrecked my married life—­and he got his information from those letters, before he put them into your hands.”  She waited a while, and recovered herself.  “That was the first of the questions I wanted to put to you,” she said.  “I am answered.  I ask no more.”

She was surely wrong about Father Benwell?  I tried to show her why.

I told her that my reverend friend had put the letters into my hand, with the seal which protected them unbroken.  She laughed disdainfully.  Did I know him so little as to doubt for a moment that he could break a seal and replace it again?  This view was entirely new to me; I was startled, but not convinced.  I never desert my friends—­even when they are friends of no very long standing—­and I still tried to defend Father Benwell.  The only result was to make her alter her intention of asking me no more questions.  I innocently roused in her a ne w curiosity.  She was eager to know how I had first become acquainted with the priest, and how he had contrived to possess himself of papers which were intended for my reading only.

There was but one way of answering her.

It was far from easy to a man like myself, unaccustomed to state circumstances in their proper order—­but I had no other choice than to reply, by telling the long story of the theft and discovery of the Rector’s papers.  So far as Father Benwell was concerned, the narrative only confirmed her suspicions.  For the rest, the circumstances which most interested her were the circumstances associated with the French boy.

“Anything connected with that poor creature,” she said, “has a dreadful interest for me now.”

“Did you know him?” I asked, with some surprise.

“I knew him and his mother—­you shall hear how, at another time.  I suppose I felt a presentiment that the boy would have some evil influence over me.  At any rate, when I accidentally touched him, I trembled as if I had touched a serpent.  You will think me superstitious—­but, after what you have said, it is certainly true that he has been the indirect cause of the misfortune that has fallen on me.  How came he to steal the papers?  Did you ask the Rector, when you went to Belhaven?”

“I asked the Rector nothing.  But he thought it his duty to tell me all that he knew of the theft.”

She drew her chair nearer to me.  “Let me hear every word of it!” she pleaded eagerly.

I felt some reluctance to comply with the request.

“Is it not fit for me to hear?” she asked.

This forced me to be plain with her.  “If I repeat what the Rector told me,” I said, “I must speak of my wife.”