“One had no chance. From the first I knew there was no chance.”
“There was some one else?”
“He came up and down. I seldom met him. Then there were the circumstances. She was between the Nisi and the Absolute, the nether and the upper stone....”
“Oh, yes, I remember now. She was divorced.”
“No, she was not. She divorced her husband,” he answered quite sharply and a little distressed. “Courts of Justice they are called, but Courts of Injustice would be a better name. They put her to the question, on the rack; no inquisition could have been worse. And she was broken by it....”
“But there was some one else, you said yourself there was some one else. Probably these probing questions, this rack, were her deserts. Personally I am a monogamist,” I retorted. Not that I was really narrow or a Pharisee, only in contentious mood and cruel under the pressure of my own harrow. “Probably anything she suffered served her right,” I added indifferently.
“It all happened afterwards. I thought you knew,” he said incoherently.
“I know nothing except that you are always talking of Margaret Capel, and I am a little tired of the subject,” I answered pettishly. “Who was the man?”
“The man!”
“Yes, the man who came up and down to see her?”