She was relieved when he spoke.

“Mrs. Scoville (not Deborah now) have you any confidence in Oliver’s word?”

She did not reply at once.  Too much depended upon a simple yes or no.  Her first instinctive cry would have been yes, but if Oliver had been guilty and yet held back his dreadful secret all these years, how could she believe his word, when his whole life had been a lie?

“Has there ever been anything in his conversation as you knew it in Detroit to make you hesitate to reply?” the judge persisted, as she continued speechless.

“No; nothing.  I had every confidence in his assertions.  I should have yet, if it were not for this horror.”

“Forget it for a moment.  Recall his effect upon you as a man, a prospective son-in-law,—­for you meant him to marry Reuther.”

“I trusted him.  I would trust him in many ways yet.”

“Would you trust him enough to believe that he would tell you the truth if you asked him point-blank whether his hands were clean of crime?”

“Yes.”  The word came in a whisper; but there was no wavering in it.  She had felt the conviction dart like an arrow through her mind that Oliver might slay a man in his hate,—­might even conceal his guilt for years—­but that he could not lie about it when brought face to face with an accuser like herself.

“Then I will let you read something he wrote at my request these many years ago:  An experience—­the tale of one awful night, the horrors of which, locked within his mind and mine, have never been revealed to a third person.  That you should share our secret now, is not only necessary but fitting.  It becomes the widow of John Scoville to know what sort of a man she persists in regarding innocent.  Wait here for me.”

With a quick step he wound his way among the various encumbering pieces of furniture, to the door opening into his bedroom.  A breathless moment ensued, during which she heard his key turn in the lock, followed by the repeating sound of his footsteps, as he wended his way inside to a point she could only guess at from her knowledge of the room, to be a dresser in one of the corners.  Here he lingered so long that, without any conscious volition of her own,—­almost in spite of her volition which would have kept her where she was,—­she found herself on her feet, then moving step by step, more cautiously than he, in and out of huddling chairs and cluttering tables till she came to a stand-still before the reflection (in some mirror, no doubt) of the judge’s tall form, bending not over the dresser, as she had supposed, but before a cupboard in the wall—­a cupboard she had never seen, in a wall she had never seen, but now recognised for the one hitherto concealed by the great carpet rug.  He had a roll of paper in his hand, which he bundled together as he dropped the curtain back into place and then stopped to smooth it out over the floor with the precision of long habit.  All this she saw in the mirror as though she had been at his back in the other room; but when she beheld him turn, then panic seized her and she started breathlessly for the spot where he had left her, glad that there was so little light, and praying that he might be deaf to her steps, which, gently as they fell, sounded portentously loud in her own ears.