we 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 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 go