“What, the doctor who was so like Johnson, the card-sharper!”
Audrey uttered a low cry.
“Why! Do you think he too was one of the gang?” she asked, almost giddy with these revelations, following so swiftly the one upon the heels of the other.
“I think it most likely. However, we’ll have a hunt in the directory in the morning. In the meantime I’m going to write to my cousins. They’re a rackety pair, and will welcome the chance of being in any shindy. And I’ll get them to come here and help us through with this business.”
“Oh, Gerard, what are you going to do? I feel so frightened! I feel as if we—you and I—were standing together on the edge of a precipice.”
“And I,” whispered Gerard back, with his face aglow, “feel as if I had escaped from the edge of the precipice and as if I had my hand on the rascal who drove me there!”
There was silence for a few minutes. Neither had even dared to mention yet the thought that was uppermost in the minds of both—that the crime of which Gerard had been accused and convicted, was the work of the man, whom they had known as Reginald Candover, and whom Audrey had heard of also under the name of Eugène Reynolds.
The possibility of tracing the crime to its author, of clearing Gerard from the stain upon his own honour, was so bewildering, so overwhelming, that both the young husband and his wife felt almost crazy at the exciting prospect.
But Gerard felt so strongly that the man in whose hands they had both been as clay in the potter’s fingers was an adversary of consummate strength and craft, that he was anxious not to discuss the glorious prospect which he began dimly to see glimmering in the distance, lest some chance word should be overheard and carried to the ears of the arch-conspirator himself.
Even if they were really alone now, it was better by over-reticence to school themselves to a prudence that should leave no loophole of danger, and even, if possible, to behave as if they did not believe in the momentous discovery which both were sure they had made.