“Yes, yes.”
“Then I don’t know how to apologize to you. I don’t know what to say to excuse myself. In fact, there is nothing for it but to confess that ill health had made me a sleepwalker, and that this is not the first time I have been put into very embarrassing situations by this terribly unfortunate habit.”
Mabin frowned frankly. She was an honest, truthful girl, and this man lost her respect the moment he began to tell her what she knew to be falsehoods. Her indignation gave her courage. It was in a much more assured tone that she went on:
“I know it is not the first time, because it happened the very night before. But I know also that you were not asleep, because when you saw that the person in the room was not the person you expected to find there, you went away. Besides, I saw you when you had got out into the garden,” added she quickly, “and you were quite wide-awake. At first I thought you must be a burglar, and I was dreadfully frightened; but when I saw you were not, I was more frightened still. And do you think it is right to come into people’s houses like that at night and frighten them into fainting fits?”
And Mabin, who had sprung off her chair in her excitement, confronted him with quite an Amazonian air of defiance and reproach.
She felt remorseful, however, almost before she came to the end of her harangue. For he took her onslaught so meekly, so humbly, that she was disarmed. When she had finished, he began to pace quickly up and down the room.
“I know it’s wrong, I know it, I know it,” he repeated, as if to himself. “I know I ought not to be here at all. I know I am exposing myself and—and others” (his tone dropped into an indescribable softness on the word) “to dangers, to misery, by my presence. And yet I have not the strength of mind to go.”
He did not once turn his head to look at his visitor as he uttered these words; indeed she thought, by the monotonous, almost inaudible tones in which he spoke, walking hurriedly up and down, with his eyes on the ground, that he did not even remember that he was not alone. And when he had finished speaking, he still continued his walk up and down, without so much as a glance in her direction, until suddenly, when he had reached the end of the room where she was sitting, he drew himself up and fixing his eyes upon her, asked abruptly:
“Did she know? Did she guess? Did you tell her?”
Mabin had an impulse of amazing astuteness. She had come here to find out why Mr. Banks made burglarious entry into “The Towers!” Here was an opportunity of finding out the relations between him and her friend.