"Mr. Graham Leroy, your uncle's lawyer?"
"Yes, that is the man."
"Your uncle wished you to marry him?"
"He did."
"Mr. Leroy has asked you to become his wife?"
"He has."
The cold, even tones of the two speakers, and the quiet expressionless faces seemed to rob this strange conversation of all hint of personality. For myself, I felt a glad thrill that Janet Pembroke could speak thus dispassionately of the man with whom I had feared she was in love. And, yet, in love with him she might be, for as a lawyer, I knew much of the vagaries and contradictions of woman's perversity; and I realized that the mere fact of Miss Pembroke's excessive calm might mean only a hiding of excessive emotion.
Inexorably the Coroner went on.
"Did your uncle promise you a large sum of money if you would marry Mr. Leroy?"
Miss Pembroke flashed a reproachful glance at Charlotte, who had of course brought about this question, but she answered, in a steady voice: "It was not of the nature of a bargain, as your words seem to imply."