"Man alive, you try me beyond endurance. Do you believe I don't know the truth—that Rose de Bercy was your wife—that you were in that museum before the murder—that you.... Oh, Furneaux, you wring it from me. Get a pistol, man, before it is too late."
"You mean that?" cried Furneaux, his eyes gleaming with a new fire.
"Heaven knows I do!"
"You want to be my friend, then, after all?"
"Friend! If you realized half the torture——"
"Pity!" mused Furneaux aloud. "Why didn't you speak sooner? So you would rather I committed suicide than be in your hands a prisoner?"
Winter then awoke to the consciousness that this extraordinary conversation was taking place in a crowded thoroughfare, within a stone's throw of a police-station in which lay three people charged with having committed the very crime he was tacitly accusing Furneaux of, while Clarke's ferret eyes must be resting on them with a suspicion already half-formed.
"I can say no more," he muttered gruffly. "One must forego friendship when duty bars the way. But if you have a grain of humanity left in your soul, come with me and release that unhappy young man——"
Some gush of emotion wrung Furneaux's face as if with a spasm of physical pain. He held out his right hand.