It was a pity to have devoted all that ingenuity, to have saddled himself with considerable expense as regards that troublesome Salvatore, when fate all the time was busier and wiser than he.... Yet it had been necessary, and it was no use wasting regret over it.
What stood in his way now was the letter and the register. With regard to the former it was easy to destroy it, and to indicate to Salvatore that all required of him was to hold his tongue, or, if necessary, to tell a mere simple truth that he had given Colin two letters, one--he seemed to recollect--dated March 1, in which his sister announced her marriage, the other a fortnight later, giving news of the birth of the twins. Uncle Salvatore, with his Viagi pride, so Colin smilingly reflected, would be glad that the stain on the family honour could be expunged; Rosina was married when she brought forth. For him, too, it was pleasant to have the bar sinister lifted from him. It would not, he allowed, have weighed heavily on him; in any case it would have been amply compensated for by the enjoyment of Stanier and the expulsion of Raymond, but now there was no need for that ounce of bitter.... So much, then, for the letters; they could be destroyed. Violet would ask in vain for their production to prove her possession.
“What letters do you mean, darling?” he would answer. Yes, those letters should perish at once.
He turned his thoughts to the register. There at this moment it reposed in that archive-room, bearing the erasure so easily overlooked, so convincing when pointed out. You had but to look carefully, and, so to speak, you could see nothing but the erased numeral: it stared at you. He had, it was true, in his keeping a copy of that entry, certified to be correct by Mr. Cecil, which bore the earlier date, but, now that Violet had been informed of that erasure, she would, when Stanier changed hands, insist on the production of the register, and, knowing where to look and what to see, her lawyer would draw the conclusion, which even in the absence of confirming letters, might easily satisfy a jury. The register had been tampered with, and in whose interests but Colin’s? And by what hand? Without doubt by his father’s (not that that would hurt him then) or his own. There was danger, remote perhaps but alive and smouldering, on that page; it must be quenched.