"Betteredge," I said, "is there any hint to guide me at the end of the
letter?"
He looked up slowly, with a heavy sigh.
"There is nothing to guide you, Mr. Franklin," he answered. "If you
take my advice you will keep the letter in the cover till these present
anxieties of yours have come to an end. It will sorely distress you,
whenever you read it. Don't read it now."
I put the letter away in my pocket-book.
A glance back at the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of Betteredge's
Narrative will show that there really was a reason for my thus sparing
myself, at a time when my fortitude had been already cruelly tried.
Twice over, the unhappy woman had made her last attempt to speak to me.
And twice over, it had been my misfortune (God knows how innocently!)
to repel the advances she had made to me. On the Friday night,
as Betteredge truly describes it, she had found me alone at the
billiard-table. Her manner and language suggested to me and would have
suggested to any man, under the circumstances--that she was about to
confess a guilty knowledge of the disappearance of the Diamond. For her
own sake, I had purposely shown no special interest in what was coming;
for her own sake, I had purposely looked at the billiard-balls, instead
of looking at HER--and what had been the result? I had sent her away
from me, wounded to the heart! On the Saturday again--on the day when
she must have foreseen, after what Penelope had told her, that my
departure was close at hand--the same fatality still pursued us.
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