He listened again.
“No,” he persisted categorically, “I say I think there must be some mistake. You say that a Mrs. Christine Arkwright died suddenly in a second-rate boarding-house—at that address I don’t know—and you’ve traced me out—I quite understand all that. But I say I have good reason to think there is a mistake somewhere—it couldn’t be—— What?”
He smiled with a grim superiority as he listened.
“What?—You say there’s no doubt of the identity?”
His brows puckered suddenly in the frown with which he prepared the annihilation of a stupid and stubbornly insistent witness.
“Now, pay attention, my friend!—When did this event occur?” He asked the question in the tone of one confident of establishing an impossibility by a counter fact. There was a moment of pause—and then his expression changed. “To-night?—At eleven o’clock?”
The clock in the study struck, discreetly, twelve.