"What are those facts?"
"It's a most shocking affair, dear, and I am afraid will distress you. I was dreadfully grieved about it; for you know I thought Mr. Armstrong so nice at first. It appears that old Mr. Farquharson the clerk was right, and that, though Mr. Armstrong appears so pleasant and well-bred and charming, he indulges periodically in fits of heavy drinking, during which he is really like a wild beast and not responsible for his actions."
"Who told you all this?"
"Mrs. Fitzroy Cleaver was talking about it yesterday. She had to forbid him her house because he got frightfully tipsy and tried to make love to the servants. That happened last year; but he is never to be trusted, she declared, and may break out at any moment."
"I simply don't believe it!"
"Will you believe your eyes?" asked Clare, lowering her white lids to hide the triumph in her gaze. "Read this; it is from the Daily Leader of last June."
As she spoke, she took from her purse and laid in front of Laline's plate a cutting from a newspaper, headed—"Disgraceful Conduct of a Gentleman."
Laline's heart beat with a sickening apprehension. Not wishing Clare to see her emotion, she rose from the table and took the cutting to the window, where, with checks crimson with mortification, she read that Wallace Armstrong, "stated to be nephew to the well-known banker Alexander Wallace," had been brought before the magistrate on a charge of drunkenness and brutal assault on the police. The accused, it was stated, made no answer to the charge; and, it being proved that on three previous occasions fines had been inflicted for similar offences and instantly paid, the magistrate decided to mark his sense of the man's disgraceful conduct by sending him to prison with hard labour for six months.
"Of course they got him off again," Clare volunteered, as Laline returned the paper to her without speaking, "and it was kept out of most of the papers. I am so dreadfully sorry for that poor dear old Mr. Wallace! That sort of drunkenness is nothing else but insanity; and I suppose one ought to be sorry for Mr. Armstrong as well. As soon as I heard the dreadful story it explained so many things I couldn't understand during our visit the other day. That person shut up near the studio, for instance, was no doubt Mr. Armstrong's keeper, close at hand to look after him in case he should have one of his attacks."
"You pretended that it was a woman who sprang out upon you."