"Leo, she was your mistress!"
Now he needed his utmost strength to parry the attack. "I don't understand you, my dear," he said, shrugging his shoulders with affected coolness.
"Are you going to deny it, Leo?" she asked.
He looked hard at her, full of suspicion. Yet, after all, what could she know? A rumour from the gossip round neighbouring coffee-tables may have reached her ears, which had become a fixed idea in her pondering brain, and now seemed to her an actual fact. That must be it. It couldn't be otherwise. Yet he resolved, at all events, to sound her cautiously.
"Look here, my dear child," he said, "nothing is further from my thoughts than to pose to you as a saint. I am, and have been all my life, a full-blooded piece of goods.... But, I assure you ... I haven't the slightest notion to which of my foolish affairs--all are over now--you are referring."
"I am not speaking of 'foolish affairs,' but of adultery," she answered.
"Indeed! Is it possible?" he inquired, still schooling himself to scorn. "That is almost worthy of the holy mouth of our old pastor Brenckenberg. And that leads me to a conclusion at which I have slowly arrived, that you have had a hand in the lamentations he poured out over me to-day."
"You have only just arrived at that conclusion?" she exclaimed.
"You know I am a little dense," he replied, with a laugh. But a cold sweat had broken out on his forehead.
She gazed at him, seeking to find a passport into his soul. "You want to spare her," she said, with a weary smile of contempt. "It is hardly necessary now. I let myself be deceived by her long enough. She knew well how to play, the innocent with those eyes. Through her consummate acting she ruined you all ... the perfidious woman."