Despard did not reply for a moment. There was a queer pause and catch in his voice as if he sought uneasily for breath.
"Miss Van Arlen is here, and the old man, Jacob Van Arlen, the grandfather."
"And the mother?" asked Aylmer, with a note of surprise in his voice. "Lady Landon, or does one call her Mrs. Van Arlen?"
"She is broken down in health," answered Despard, in a curiously wooden, expressionless accent. "She has been—recommended to try for at least six months the effects of an Alpine Sanatorium."
The two listeners understood, or thought they understood, and muttered their sympathy in an almost inaudible chorus.
"Insane?" they whispered. "Insane?"
Despard smote his hand down upon the rotting wood.
"No!" he cried fiercely. "Her brain is as sound as yours or mine, but her heart has been frozen. By God! Try to think, imagine, if you can, what hell a woman has lived in who was the wife of Landon!"
His passion seemed to choke him. His eyes glowed, his chest heaved, he was another man from the one who had sat down smilingly to smoke a cigarette with them a few minutes before. And the passion of his wrath infected his hearers. Imagination painted pictures in their brains; they, too, breathed a little faster as they listened.
The gust of Despard's passion passed and left him calm again. He gave a tiny shrug of the shoulders, which seemed to imply apology. He began to speak with ordinary unshaken accents.