I folded this letter carefully and put it aside. The little package he had sent me lay in my hand--a bundle of neatly folded letters tied together with a narrow ribbon, and strongly perfumed with the faint sickly perfume I knew and abhorred. I turned them over and over; the edges of the note-paper were stained with blood--Guido's blood--as though in its last sluggish flowing it had endeavored to obliterate all traces of the daintily penned lines that now awaited my perusal. Slowly I untied the ribbon. With methodical deliberation I read one letter after the other. They were all from Nina--all written to Guido while he was in Rome, some of them bearing the dates of the very days when she had feigned to love ME--me, her newly accepted husband. One very amorous epistle had been written on the self-same evening she had plighted her troth to me! Letters burning and tender, full of the most passionate protestations of fidelity, overflowing with the sweetest terms of endearment; with such a ring of truth and love throughout them that surely it was no wonder that Guido's suspicions were all unawakened, and that he had reason to believe himself safe in his fool's paradise. One passage in this poetical and romantic correspondence fixed my attention: it ran thus: "Why do you write so much of marriage to me, Guido mio? it seems to my mind that all the joy of loving will be taken from us when once the hard world knows of our passion. If you become my husband you will assuredly cease to be my lover, and that would break my heart. Ah, my best beloved! I desire you to be my lover always, as you were when Fabio lived--why bring commonplace matrimony into the heaven of such a passion as ours?"
I studied these words attentively. Of course I understood their drift. She had tried to feel her way with the dead man. She had wanted to marry me, and yet retain Guido for her lonely hours, as "her lover always!" Such a pretty, ingenious plan it was! No thief, no murderer ever laid more cunning schemes than she, but the law looks after thieves and murderers. For such a woman as this, law says, "Divorce her--that is your best remedy." Divorce her! Let the criminal go scot-free! Others may do it that choose--I have different ideas of justice!
Tying up the packet of letters again, with their sickening perfume and their blood-stained edges, I drew out the last graciously worded missive I had received from Nina. Of course I heard from her every day--she was a most faithful correspondent! The same affectionate expressions characterized her letters to me as those that had deluded her dead lover--with this difference, that whereas she inveighed much against the prosiness of marriage to Guido, to me she drew the much touching pictures of her desolate condition: how lonely she had felt since her "dear husband's" death, how rejoiced she was to think that she was soon again to be a happy wife--the wife of one so noble, so true, so devoted as I was! She had left the convent and was now at home--when should she have the happiness of welcoming me, her best beloved Cesare, back to Naples? She certainly deserved some credit for artistic lying; I could not understand how she managed it so well. Almost I admired her skill, as one sometimes admires a cool-headed burglar, who has more skill, cunning, and pluck than his comrades. I thought with triumph that though the wording of Ferrari's will enabled her to secure all other letters she might have written to him, this one little packet of documentary evidence was more than sufficient for MY purposes. And I resolved to retain it in my own keeping till the time came for me to use it against her.