“Look here, Jim,” she began slowly, “do you know what you’re doing?  Well, you’re making me tired!” In spite of himself, a half-superstitious thrill went through him as her words and attitude recalled the dead Scranton.  “Do you suppose that I don’t know that you ran away the night of the fire?  Do you suppose that I don’t know that you were next to ruined that night, and that you took that opportunity of skedaddling out of the country with all the money you had left, and leaving folks to imagine you were burnt up with the books you had falsified and the accounts you had doctored!  It was a mean thing for you to do to me, Jim, for I loved you then, and would have 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.