Belassis looked thoroughly frightened and taken aback.
‘Wh—what do you kn—know about Wh—Whitbury?’ he stammered, his face growing pale.
‘I don’t know anything yet; but I mean to know all pretty soon,’ answered Mrs. Belassis coolly and firmly. ‘You are not such a fool as to try and deceive me? You ought to know by this time that you couldn’t do it.’
‘Why should I know anything of Whitbury?’ asked Belassis, trying all he knew to speak naturally.
‘Why should you turn perfectly livid at the bare mention of the name, if you didn’t?’
‘I wasn’t very well that evening—Philip had startled me by coming in so suddenly upon us.’
‘Look here, Alfred!’ said Mrs. Belassis significantly. ‘You know, and what’s more, I believe Philip Debenham knows, that you have some mysterious connection with Whitbury. If you won’t tell me, I shall ask him; and if he doesn’t satisfy me, I shall apply direct to Miss Marjory Descartes. I have not any reason to suppose that she will screen you, if she knows of anything to your discredit.’
Belassis thus brought to bay, collapsed suddenly and hopelessly. In encounters with his wife he invariably got the worst of it.
‘I—I—Indeed, my dear, I should have told you all long ago, only it seemed useless to rake up old stories of dead-and-gone follies. Young men will be young men, you know; and boys will be boys. I was little more than a boy when I went to Whitbury to fish, and I did get into some little trouble there—money trouble, I mean—and I dare say if people hadn’t been good-natured, and not been too hard upon me, it would have gone rather hardly with me.’
Belassis, with an air of great good faith, gave the particulars of the little fraud he had unsuccessfully perpetrated (to which Miss Marjory had alluded in talking to Tor), and the names given, and the circumstantial correctness of the story, convinced Mrs. Belassis that it was a true one.