Molly paused for a moment.  She held herself erect, her white gown crushed against the rich, dark curtain, her great eyes searching the trees in the park below as if she sought there for the soul of her enemy.  She did not know that she pulled hard at the curtain behind her with both hands; it could not have held out much longer, strong though it was.

“No; you knew life too well not to know that you might be found out, but the truth was that you did not care.  It was so little a thing to you that, when you saw that I knew the truth, you could go on just the same, quite unabashed.  You could force yourself on me by playing on your poverty; you, who had tried to ruin my mother!  Well, she is out of your reach, and perhaps you have shifted your foul suspicions on to me.  Perhaps it is from me you hope to get the fortune that you mean to share.  You drive me mad!  I say things I don’t want to say; you force me to lower myself, but——­” She turned now and faced Edmund, who watched her, himself absolutely motionless.  “Now that you have forced yourself on me again you shall answer me.  Do you believe that I, Molly Dexter, have concealed or abetted in concealing or destroying any will in favour of Lady Rose Bright?”

There is a moment when passion is astonishingly inventive.  Molly had had no intention of saying anything of the kind, but the heat of passion had produced a stroke of policy that no colder moment could have produced.  She was suddenly dumb with astonishment at her own words, and she dimly recognised that this represented a distinct crisis in her own mind.  Passion and excitement had dissipated the last mists of self-deception.

Edmund waited till there could be no faint suspicion of his trying to interrupt her, and then said from his heart, in a voice she had never heard from him before: 

“No, I swear to you I don’t.”

Molly had been deeply flushed.  At these words she turned very white, and her hands let go the curtains.  She put them out before her and seemed to grope her way to a stiff, high-backed chair near to her.  She sat down in it and clasped her hands to her forehead.

“Now you must hear me,” said Edmund.  “I don’t say I am blameless:  in part of this I have done wrong, but not as wrong as you think.  I must tell you my story; although perhaps it may seem blacker as I tell it, even to myself.”

He sat down and bent forward a little.

“When I was young I fell in love with my cousin.  She has been and always will be the one woman in the world to me.  She did not, does not, never will, return my feelings.  She married, and before very long I was convinced she was not happy, although she only half realised it herself.  She is capable of stifling her powers of perception.  Then David Bright died and left her in poverty.  His will was a scandal, and the horror did not only smirch his good name, it reached to hers.  I can’t and won’t try to tell you what I suffered, or