“Go and see her. Find out what I have done or failed to do. Get me an interview with her.”
“Really,” she said, with a hard little laugh, “you must regard me as a very good-natured person.”
“You are,” he answered unconsciously. “I am sure that you are. I want her to tell me the whole truth about this extraordinary marriage. We will find some way out of it.”
“You think that you can do that?”
“I am sure of it,” he answered, confidently. “Those things are arranged more easily in any other country than England. At any rate she must see me. I demand it as a right. I must know what new thing has come between us that she should treat me as a lover one day and a monster the next.”
She leaned back amongst the cushions of her chair. She was very pale, but she reminded him more at that minute than at any time of “Alcide” as he had first known her.
“I wonder,” she said, “how much you care.”
“I care as a man cares only once in his life,” he answered promptly. “When it comes there is no mistaking it.”
“Did it come—in Paris?”
“I do not know,” he answered. “I do not think so. What does it matter? It is here, and it is here to stay. Do help me, Lady Ferringhall. You need not be afraid. No trouble will ever come to your sister through me. If this idiotic marriage is binding then I will be her friend. But I have powerful friends. I only want to know the truth, and I will move heaven and earth to have it set aside.”