"I suspect he thought afterwards that you might have taken his suggestion seriously."
"What do you mean?"
"He has absolutely refused to give any hint of where he had lost his cane. Of course he had not forgotten. But there was in his mind the possibility that you had, under some necessity, acted upon his suggestion, and had taken his cane with you when you went out that night,--" He had been talking rapidly, following out his own line of reasoning, and forgetting for the moment that the implication it contained must be startling to her, till he was pulled up by the look of horror and amazement that had gathered on her face.
"What are you saying?" she cried. "Good heavens, what do you mean? You haven't been thinking that I--I killed Mr. Fullerton with Arthur's cane?"
"I haven't," said Lyon, simply. "I haven't from the first. But it was very natural that, knowing what he knew and not knowing what he didn't, Lawrence should have felt that to clear himself would be to implicate you."
Her horror was too deep for words. She only stared at him, with that fixed look of dismay.
"Of course," added Lyon, "now that we can explain the cane away, he will probably speak out."
"Was that why he was so anxious I should say nothing?--because he thought I--oh, it is not to be believed!"
"But consider, Miss Wolcott! It seemed very clear. He knew he had left his cane here, he of course remembered the talk you had had about it as a weapon of defense, he knew that you were out of the house that evening, because he called to see you at a quarter of nine and you were not in. He knew, also, that you had reason to hate Fullerton, he knew that a woman was with Fullerton when he was killed and that when she fled from the spot she came to this house--"
She interrupted him with a cry. "No, no! How can he think that? It is not true! I did go to the Wellington as I told you, meaning to see him and try to appeal to his better nature, if he had one, for the return of my letters, but gave up my plan when I found I could not see him alone. But I saw nothing of him after he left the Wellington with Mrs. Broughton."