'Yes, as I told you before, I knew him to be a bad fellow, and a particularly undesirable acquaintance for Mrs. Claxton,' said Statham. 'But I confess, Madame Du Tertre, that I do not yet see why you should fix upon Mr. Wetter as the guilty person in the present instance, independently, that is to say, of the fact that he was with Mrs. Claxton in the interval between your leaving home and your return, during which she seems to have acquired this information. I should not have thought that Wetter could have known anything about the Calverley and Claxton mystery.'
'He knows everything that he wants to know,' cried Pauline with energy; 'He is a fiend, a clever merciless fiend. If it were his interest--and it was, as I happen to know--to make himself acquainted with Alice's history, he would learn it at whatever cost of money, patience, and trouble! It is he that has done this and no one else, be sure of that.'
'We must allow then, I suppose,' said Humphrey Statham, referring to the paper which he still held in his hand, 'that the discovery which Mrs. Claxton claims to have made is that of her relations with Mr. Calverley, and it seems likely that she gained the information from Mr. Wetter, who gave it her for his own purpose. I take only a subordinate part in the matter, Martin, as your friend, but it strikes me that it is for you, as Alice's guardian, to ask Madame Du Tertre, who has evidently a bad opinion--worse than mine almost--of Mr. Wetter, why, having that opinion, she introduced this man to Alice, and suffered him to become intimate at Pollington-terrace.'
'Why did you do this?' cried Martin, turning almost fiercely upon her. 'You say yourself that this is a bad man, and that nothing will stop him when his mind is once made up to the commission no matter of what crime, and yet you bring him to the house and present him to this girl, whom it was so necessary to shield and protect.'
He spoke so wrathfully that Statham looked up in surprise at his friend, and then glancing with pity at the shrinking figure of Pauline, said, in mitigation:
'You must recollect that Mr. Wetter discovered Madame Du Tertre's address by accident, and that he was her cousin!'
'He is not my cousin,' said Pauline, in a low subdued voice, gazing at Martin with tearful eyes, 'I deceived you in that statement, as in many others about Mr. Wetter, and about myself.'
'Not your cousin!' said Martin; 'why, then, did you represent him to be so?'
'Because he insisted on it,' said Pauline, gesticulating freely; 'because he had a certain hold over me which I could not shake off, and which he would have exercised to my detriment if I had not implicitly obeyed him.'
'But how could he have done anything to your detriment so far as we were concerned?' asked Martin.