“I wish to God he had, but he never did, Mrs. Williams. Those letters may form the bulk of the evidence against you. You repeat in them, again and again, that Williams ill-treated you, made you miserable, and that you wish he was dead. In one of them occurs the words: ‘He’s ill now, and taking sleeping draughts. One little mistake in pouring out the mixture, Leslie, and you and I might be free! I’d do more than that for our love’s sake, darling.’ Do you understand the awful weight that those expressions and many, many similar ones would carry with a jury, Mrs. Williams? We’ve got to put some construction on them other than the obvious one, if we can’t get a ruling that they’re inadmissible as evidence, which is what we shall try for. I want to make it very, very clear to you. Everything depends on your co-operation. Are you fit to listen to me?” Elsie was sobbing and writhing. “Have you any letters whatever from Morrison?” pursued the relentless voice of the solicitor. “No.” “What have you done with them?” “I burnt them all.” He looked at her as though doubting her words. “Very few women burn their love-letters, Mrs. Williams.” “I was afraid to keep them.” “For fear of your husband seeing them?” She hesitated. “Partly.” In Elsie’s mind was a piercing recollection of the haunting fear that had obsessed her ever since the scene at the house of Madame Clara, the medium. “_Beware of the written word...._” But she would not give that reason for having destroyed Morrison’s letters to the solicitor. The strange, undying remnant of vanity that finds a lurking-place upon the most apparently trivial and unlikely ground held her back from the truth. Elsie Williams realised that Mr. Cleaver was in grimmest earnest when he told her that only the absolute truth could possibly save her; she was prepared to tell him the truth in spite of her deadly terror and shame, but she could not bring herself to say that the reason why she had destroyed the letters of Leslie Morrison was because she could never forget the words spoken by the clairvoyante whom she had visited. “I burnt the letters because I had nowhere to keep them, and I was afraid they might be found,” she repeated, her young face grey and ravaged. It was the only particular in which she lied to Mr. Cleaver, and she did so with blind and irrational persistence. After the hours that he spent with her, Elsie, physically exhausted, and psychically strung to a pitch of tension that she had never known in her life before, was left alone in her cell, face to face with her own soul.