"Your reverence is a Legitimist?" grinned Landon.
"In every sense of the word, Signor. My sense of legitimacy finds your arguments unsound."
He looked at Claire with an apologetic bow.
"And as a matter of fact, Signora, I have not heard your statement. How does it vary from this gentleman's? Or does it, perhaps, corroborate it?"
She looked at him very steadily.
"The man to whom you have been talking," she said slowly, "is, I think, Signor, the worst man whom God permits to live."
He made a little gesture of protest.
"You have suffered at his hands—is that it? But your sentence is too sweeping a one, is it not? Surely, Signora, surely?"
She shook her head.
"No!" she said determinedly. "Traitor, forger, thief—we know him to be all these. And last, but not least, murderer. A murderer of souls. I do not know if he has taken a fellow creature's life, but for five years he racked into the numbness of despair the soul of my sister, who was his wife."