‘Why should I have to explain? You have known me many years, Mr. Barry. Of what’—looking him fair in the face—‘do you accuse me?’
‘That hardly requires an answer,’ says Mr. Barry calmly. And all at once Wyndham knows that the trouble he had dreamed of is already on him. There is gossip rife in the neighbourhood about him and this mysterious tenant of his cottage. People are talking—soon it will come to the old man’s ears, and to his aunt’s, and to Josephine’s. The last idea is the least troublesome. ‘You must surely have heard some rumours yourself. I am willing, I am most anxious,’ says the Rector, with growing earnestness, ‘to hear the truth of a story that seems, as it now stands, to be disastrous to two people. You, Wyndham, are one of them. No, not a word. Hear me first. I want to say just this: that if I was a little harsh to you a moment ago, it was because of Susan. One’s daughter has the first claim. And she—that child—to be—You tell me you did not take her to see—’
‘I told you that,’ says Wyndham, ‘and I told you, too’—very straightly—‘that if I had done so I should see no reason why I should be ashamed of it. However, I had nothing to do with your daughter’s visit to Miss Moore. It appears Miss Moore asked her to come into my—her—’
The Rector stops him with an impatient gesture.
‘Whose is it, yours or hers?’ asks he.
‘Mine, yet hers in a sense, too,’ begins and ends the fluent lawyer, whose fluency has now, at his need, deserted him.
‘I do not understand your evasions.’
‘If you will let me—’
‘I want no explanations,’ says the Rector coldly. ‘I want only one answer to one plain question: Who is this Miss Moore?’
He looks straight at Wyndham. The extenuating circumstances he had believed in grow smaller and smaller.