been fool enough to run off with
you if you'd told me all, and not left me to find out that you had lost
MY money--every cent Cutler had left me in the business--with the rest."

With the fatuousness of a weak man cornered, he clung to unimportant
details. "But the body was believed to be mine by every one," he
stammered angrily. "My papers and books were burnt,--there was no
evidence."

"And why was there not?" she said witheringly, staring doggedly in his
face. "Because I stopped it! Because when I knew those bones and rags
shut up in that office weren't yours, and was beginning to make a row
about it, a strange man came to me and said they were the remains of a
friend of his who knew your bankruptcy and had come that night to warn
you,--a man whom you had half ruined once, a man who had probably lost
his life in helping you away. He said if I went on making a fuss he'd
come out with the whole truth--how you were a thief and a forger,
and"--she stopped.

"And what else?" he asked desperately, dreading to hear his wife's name
next fall from her lips.

"And that--as it could be proved that his friend knew your secrets,"
she went on in a frightened, embarrassed voice, "you might be accused of
making away with him."

For a moment James Smith was appalled; he had never thought of this. As
in all his past villainy he was too cowardly to contemplate murder,
he was frightened at the mere accusation of it. "But," he stammered,
forgetful of all save this new terror, "he KNEW I wouldn't be such a
fool, for the man himself told me Duffy had the papers, and killing him
wouldn't have helped me."

Mrs. Cutler stared at him a moment searchingly, and then turned wearily
away. "Well," she said, sinking into her chair again, "he said if I'd
shut my mouth he'd shut his--and--I did. And this," she added,
throwing her hands from her lap, a gesture half of reproach and half of
contempt,--"this is what I get for it."

More frightened than touched by the woman's desperation, James Smith
stammered a vague apologetic disclaimer, even while he was loathing with
a revulsion new to him her draggled finery, her still more faded beauty,
and the half-distinct consciousness of guilt that linked her to him. But
she waved it away, a weary gesture that again reminded him of the dead
Scranton.

"Of course I ain't what I was, but who's to blame for it? When you left
me alone without a cent, face to face with a lie, I had to do something.
I wasn