“Well, I overheard a couple of silly cackling geese under the window the other day, but the subject of their cackle was too farcical for words—about you of course. Edala heard it too.”
“Edala heard it?”
“Yes. Then we talked it out, and she said she didn’t believe it either.”
There seemed no necessity on the part of Thornhill—perhaps from force of mental habit no such occurred to him—to ask what the said ‘it’ might be.
“She has believed it up till now, anyhow,” he said.
“And if you could have seen the awful agony of self-reproach she was in that day!” urged the other. “It seemed almost like someone blind restored to sight when I put the whole thing to her in a few words. Under any other circumstances it would have been laughable—the quick transformation, I mean.”
“Yet they had something to go upon—something to go upon,” repeated the wounded man slowly. “I may as well tell you all about it, though there’s not much to tell.”
Evelyn’s clasp of the hand she held, tightened.
“You know I was under arrest years ago on suspicion of doing away with my—legal partner in life?”
Evelyn nodded. Since she had overheard the two women’s gossip she had gone straight to Hyland and got the whole story out of him. Thornhill went on.