“Your—wife, fellow? What wife? How should I know anything about your wife? I was not even aware that you had set up a wife. May I ask what misguided woman was idiot enough to marry you? Accept my congratulations,” said the lawyer dryly.
“You know very well, sir, that I allude to your former ward. Miss Roma Fronde, who became my wife on the fifteenth of last November,” Hanson said with cool insolence.
“Or, rather, whom you sought to marry, without her knowledge or consent, by the basest fraud that ever was practiced upon human being. That fraudulent marriage ceremony was set aside by the courts as illegal, therefore null and void,” Mr. Merritt explained.
“That was a pity, for the lady’s sake, even more than for mine, when it is remembered that she went with me as my bride to the Isle of Storms,” Hanson said.
“She went to her own house, sir. To the house of which she was the heiress and the mistress. You stole into that house without her knowledge or consent, like a sneak thief at midnight. You afterward broke into her room like a murderous burglar. She had you at her mercy. Your life was in her hands, at her disposal. You had forfeited your life to her by every human law. Yet she did not take it. She spared you for the Lord’s sake. Without hurting you she escaped. She saved herself.”
“Who will believe that?” scornfully inquired Hanson. “Really, Mr. Merritt, if the court has decided that the rites by which Roma Fronde and myself were united were informal, illegal, I think their decision is very compromising to the lady, who lived with me as my wife for——”
“Get out of my office, you low beast, before I pitch you out of the window!” exclaimed the lawyer, starting to his feet, and growing purple in the face. “Go!” Hanson went.
He had no wish for a personal encounter with the stalwart old lawyer, even if it had not been possible to end in breaking his own neck out of a three-story window.
He next drove to the West End Hotel, where Roma and her friends had been in the habit of stopping while in Washington. Here he wisely inquired for the lady by her maiden name, knowing full well that she had never acknowledged his.
“Miss Fronde?” repeated the office clerk. “Yes, sir, she was here with the Grays, last November. Mr. Gray was appointed consul to Delicome, and sailed for Liverpool about the twenty-second of the month, I think.”