"

"She has. She told me all about poor Mr. Farnham, how you made him
believe you a friend to be trusted, how you induced him to smoke
opium--here in this very room--this awful room--till he was dazed and
unconscious, and how he only roused from his stupor just as you were
going to burn him alive in your horrible crematory. She told me how the
furnace went wrong at the last moment and you had to kill him in a
different way from what you had planned--less easy for you, more
dangerous of discovery. Oh, the horror of listening to those details,
for she spared me nothing--nothing! I heard from her how Mr. Stanton
came in the midst of the dreadful happenings on Christmas Day, how she
saw him through the door, and afterwards, when he had spoken to the
police, how you bribed her with jewels and money to pretend that she was
your cook, that she had screamed with the pain of burning her foot, and
how she painted her ankle to look like a red scar when she had to show
some proof of her story. She would have been true to you through
everything, she said--poor misguided woman--if she had not been taken
ill and stopped in London instead of going to France, as she had
promised, and so seen in the papers about our coming marriage. What
mockery to call it that; and yet, I thank heaven that it need only be
mockery--that it is not real.

"I wonder that the shock of finding that woman concealed in my
room--waiting for me to come--did not drive me mad. But I am not mad,
and such wit as I have I warn you I shall devote to thwarting you,
Carson Wildred. Do you think I could go on living under the same roof
with you, even if I were in reality your wife? No, you can kill me if
you like; it is the only way in which you can keep me here."

He did not answer for an instant, then he said slowly, "Do you remember
just putting your name on a paper I asked you to sign for me with my
stylographic pen in the train this afternoon? Well, you thought it was
merely an order for letters to be sent on to your new address, but it
was something rather more important than that. You put your name to a
document which leaves all the money of which you die possessed
unreservedly to me. I have already had it witnessed by my servant and
another. You understand to what this points, perhaps? If you show
yourself amenable to reason I shall consider you a wife to be proud of,
and there is no ambition which we need cherish in vain if we are to live
our lives together. B