Molly shook her head.

“Do you think,” she said, “they would have been quiet all this time if there had been any real evidence at all?  It is three years since Sir David died, and six months since my mother died.”

She did not notice how Mark started at this information.  Had Miss Dexter, then, been in possession of this letter to Lady Rose and the last will for six months?

“You were not sent these papers at once?” he ventured to ask.

“Yes; Dr. Larrone, who attended my mother, brought them to me.  He left Florence two hours after she died.”

Another silence followed.

“It seems to me that a great deal might be done by a private arrangement.  Probably their case is not strong enough, or likely to be strong enough, for them to push it through.  It should be arranged that you should receive the L1000 a year that Sir David intended to give your mother.”

Molly laughed scornfully.

“I’d rather beg my bread than be their pensioner.  No, no; you entirely mistake the situation.  I shall have no dealings with them at all—­no nonsense about arbitration or private arrangements.  I won’t give them any opportunity of feeling generous.  It must”—­she spoke very slowly and looked at him fiercely—­“with me it must be all or nothing, and”—­she got up suddenly and began smoothing her gloves over her wrists—­“and as I don’t choose to starve it must be all.  But if I can’t go through with it (which is quite possible) I shall throw up the sponge and get out of this world as quickly as possible.”

“If you have made up your mind,” said Mark sternly, “to defy God, in Whom I know that you believe, to defy the laws of man, whose punishment may come, whereas His punishment must come, why have you told me all this?”

“I had to tell some one; I was suffocating.  You don’t know”—­she stood looking out of the window a strange expression of hunger and loneliness succeeding the fierceness of a few moments before—­“you don’t know what it is to have in your own mind a long, long story about yourself that has never been told.  To have been lonely and hardly treated and deceived and spurned, and never to have put your own case to any one human being!  To have cried from childhood till twenty-two, knowing that nobody really cared!  There comes a time when you would rather say the worst of yourself than keep silence.  To accuse yourself is the natural thing; silence is the unnatural thing.”

“Good God!” said Mark, rising, “don’t stop there.  If you must accuse yourself, pass judgment also.  Class yourself where you have chosen with your eyes open to stand.  Would you allow any amount of provocation and unhappiness to excuse a systematic fraud?  Do you think that the thief brought up to sin has less or more excuse than you have?  Are you the only person who has known a lonely childhood?  Can you tell me here in this room that God never showed you what love really is?  He has never left you alone, and you wish in vain now that He would leave you alone.  For your present life is so unbearable that you feel that you may choose death rather than go on with it.”