The sick man nodded. There was a curiously vacant look upon his face, brightened only at times by gleams of vivid consciousness.
"Yes, yes, I know her. The lady that came to see me in hospital," he murmured feebly.
"Do you know who she is?"
"Why do you trouble him, sir?" said Mrs. Trent. "You see how ill he is, wouldn't it be better for him to be left in peace?"
She spoke with sedulous calmness; but there was a jar in her voice which did not sound quite natural. Maurice simply repeated his question, and Francis Trent shook his head.
"She is the wife of Caspar Brooke, the man who, you say, killed your brother Oliver."
The sick man's eyes dilated, and fixed themselves uneasily on his wife. "I did not say it," he answered, almost in a whisper. "Mary said it—not I."
"But you heard something, did you not?" said Maurice remorselessly.
"How should he hear anything," said Mary Trent, "and he asleep in his bed at the time? Or if not asleep, too ill and weak to notice anything. It's a shame to question him like that; and not legal, neither. You'll please to leave us to ourselves, sir; we ain't a show. We can but say what we saw and heard, whatever the consequences may be, but we need not be tortured for all that."
"That's enough, Mary," said the man speaking from the bed in a much more natural manner and in a stronger voice than he had yet used. "You're overdoing it—you always do. It's no good. This is the last stroke, and I give up. It has gone against the grain with me to get anybody into trouble," he said, looking attentively at Lady Alice, "and now that I know who this lady is, I don't feel inclined to keep up the farce any longer. I am much too ill to live to be hanged—Mr. Kenyon can tell you so at any minute—and I may as well give you the satisfaction of knowing that Caspar Brooke had nothing at all to do with Oliver's death: I was his murderer, and no one else: I swear it, so help me God!"