"Why? Why did you sham a telephone eall from Lucy Hodge and go to him?"
His voice contained pity for her but it was insistent in its questioning. Face twisted with emotion, she came to her resolve at last. She would tell him everything, get rid of this awful thing that had been weighing down her very heart for so many weeks. If it killed.
There is a blessed relief in confession which a guiltless person can never know. That isthe psychology behind an important tenet of one of the world's greatest religions. In the mind of the guilty one whatever punishment follows the confession cannot be as bad as the guilt which is eating their very soul.
If it killed his love for her forever, Carmelita would tell him. And so she slipped, almost without her own volition, off the chair and down upon the floor in a miserable heap at his feet.
"I will tell you, Dudley, I will tell you everything," she began and in her recital she began back at her first visit to Canary Cottage and related in pitiless detail the whole miserable account of her weakness and deception—the lie she had told him about receiving a huge sum of money from her mother's will, her disastrous gambling, the true source of the necklace he had found caught in the safe, her frantie efforts to pay her debts and her misuse of
