"I shall be glad to see the letter," she said, "because I am curious to know about Count Shimbowski. That he is what he pretends to be in the way of family I am sure, for I have seen his people in Rome."
"Oh, he is a Count all right," Barnstable responded; "but that doesn't make him any better."
"As for the book," she pursued calmly, "you are entirely off the track. The Count cannot possibly have written it. Just think of his English."
"I've known men that could write English that couldn't speak it decently."
"Besides, he hasn't been in the country long enough to have written it. If he did write it, Mr. Barnstable, how in the world could he know anything about your affairs? It seems to me, if I may say so, that you might apply a little common sense to the question before you get into a rage over things that cannot be so."
"I was hasty," admitted Barnstable, an expression of mingled penitence and woe in his face. "I'm afraid I was all wrong about the Count. But the book has so many things in it that fit, things that were particular, why, of course when Mrs.—that lady yesterday—"
"Mrs. Neligage."
"When she said the Count wrote it, I didn't stop to think."
"That was only mischief on her part. You might much better say her son wrote it than the Count."
"Her son?" repeated Barnstable, starting to his feet. "That's who it is! Why, of course it was to turn suspicion away from him that his mother—"