"Do you think, then, that Clyne would let his daughter marry a man who has done all this?" said Ferruci, who was now very pale.
"I don't believe Clyne knows anything about it," replied Lucian coldly. "You and Mrs. Vrain made up this pretty plot between you. Vrain himself told me how you decoyed him from Salisbury, and took him to Mrs. Clear's, in Bayswater, where he passed as her husband, although, as she confesses, she kept him as a kind of prisoner."
"But this is wrong," cried Ferruci, trying to laugh. "This is most foolish. How would a man, of his own will, pass as the husband of a woman he knew not?"
"A sane man would not; but none knew better than you, Count, that Vrain was not sane, and that you dosed him with drugs, and let Mrs. Clear keep him locked up in her house until you put him in the asylum. Vrain was a puppet in your hands, and you locked him up in an asylum a fortnight after the man who personated him was murdered. You intended to marry Mrs. Vrain and keep her wretched husband in that asylum all his life."
"The best place for a lunatic," said Ferruci.
"Ah!" cried Lucian. "Then you admit that that Vrain was mad?"
"I admit nothing, not even that he is alive. If what you say is true," said the Italian, cunningly, "how came it that the murdered man had the scar on his cheek? He might have been like Vrain, eh, but not so much."
"Mrs. Clear explained that," replied Lucian quickly. "You made that scar, Count, with vitriol, or some such stuff. You don't know chemistry for nothing, I see."