‘I have not been quite open with you about that affair of the sword.’
He looked yet more dismayed; but I must go on, though it tore my very heart. When I came to the point of my overhearing Clara talking to Brotherton, he started up, and, without waiting to know the subject of their conversation, came close up to me, and, his face distorted with the effort to keep himself quiet, said, in a voice hollow and still and far-off, like what one fancies of the voice of the dead:
‘Wilfrid, you said Brotherton, I think?’
‘I did, Charley.’
‘She never told me that!’
‘How could she when she was betraying your friend?’
‘No no!’ he cried, with a strange mixture of command and entreaty; ‘don’t say that. There is some explanation. There must be.’
‘She told me she hated him,’ I said.
‘I know she hates him. What was she saying to him?’
‘I tell you she was betraying me, your friend, who had never done her any wrong, to the man she had told me she hated, and whom I had heard her ridicule.’