“My——!” Leila shuddered and drew herself up abruptly. “Norman, you go too far! The construction you have placed on Mr. Brewster’s visit here to-night would be ridiculous, ludicrous under the circumstances if it were not so hideous, so unspeakably vile! I will leave you until you come to your senses.”
She turned, but he sprang before her and locking the door dropped the key into his pocket.
“You will stay here! I’m through with evasions. We’re going to have this out between us here now. You went to the Ferndale Inn with Julie Brewster yesterday, didn’t you?”
Leila eyed him steadily for a moment, then her eyelids drooped and she moistened her lips nervously.
“I have told you——”
“A lie! You were not at the Ferndale Inn yesterday, you were in New York, in the Leicester Building, in that rat Brewster’s office!”
“Brewster’s office!” she repeated. Then comprehension dawned, and she smiled sadly with infinite reproach. “Norman, you will regret that accusation bitterly when you learn the truth.”
“I know it now.” His tones shook, but a strange, tense calm had settled upon his seething brain, and even as he voiced his accusations a monstrous resolve was forming within him. “You received a letter from there this morning which you tried to hide from me. Couldn’t your poor, pitiful, complacent mind conceive that a mere child would have seen through your evasions and shallow subterfuges?”
“Stop! Stop!” She retreated from him with her hands over her ears as if to shut out the sound of his voice. “I tell you, you are mad! I can explain——”
“It’s too late for that.” His tone had steadied, and a hint of his dawning, implacable purpose glinted in his eyes. “You called him ‘mad’ last night, too, over the telephone, yet you called him ‘dear’ also, and when he held you to your promise you stole out of my house to meet him in the darkness, like a thief. You did not know that I stood listening, close enough to have touched you as you passed!”