Lady Alice turned very faint. Someone put her in a chair and fanned her, and when she came to herself she heard Francis Trent's wife speaking.
"He's mad, I tell you. It's no good paying any attention to what he says, gentlemen. I saw him myself in his bed at the time, and——"
"Now, Mary, my dear good soul," said Francis with the old easy superiority which he had always assumed to her, "will you just hold your tongue, and let me tell my own tale? You have done your best for me, but you know I always told you I was not to be trusted to lie about it if anybody appealed to me to evidence. I really have not the strength to keep it up. I want at least to die like a gentleman."
"I am not at all sure that you are going to die," said Maurice quietly, with his finger on the sick man's pulse. Francis had put off the vacant expression, and his eyes had lighted up. He was evidently quite himself again.
"No?" he said easily. "Well, I would rather die, if it's all the same to you; because I fancy I shall have to be put under restraint if I do live. I don't always know what I am doing in the least. I know now, though. You can bear me out, doctor, isn't my brain in a very queer state?"
"I fear it is," said Maurice.
"Just so. I am subject to fits of rage in which I don't know what I am doing. And on that night when Oliver came to see me, after Brooke had gone away, I got into one of these frenzies and followed him downstairs, picking up Brooke's stick on the way and beating poor Oliver about the head with it.... You know well enough how he was found. I only came to myself when it was done. And then, my wife—with all a woman's ingenuity—bundled me into bed, swore that I had never left it, and that Caspar Brooke had done it. It was a lie—she told me so afterwards. Eh, Mary?—Forgive me, old girl: I've got you into trouble now; but that is better than letting an innocent man swing for what I have done, especially when that man is the husband of one who was so kind to me——"
"And the father of Lesley Brooke," said Maurice, looking steadfastly at Mary Trent.
A shudder ran through the woman's frame. Then she covered her face with her hands and flung herself down at her husband's side.
"Oh Francis, my dear, my dear!" she said. "I did it for you."