‘Yet I do believe in his innocence—I am as certain of it as I am that I myself am no murderess—and if the evidence against him were doubly strong, my trust in him would not fail,’ said Laura, facing the accuser proudly.
‘And now, Mr. Clare, since you find that your secret is everybody’s secret, and that my wife knows all you can tell her about me——’
‘Your wife,’ sneered Edward. ‘Yes, it is as well to call her by that name.’
‘She is my wife—bound to me as securely as the law and the church can bind her.’
‘You had another wife living when you married her—unless you have been remarried since your first wife’s death——’
‘We have been so married. My wife was never mine, save in name, until I was a free man,—free to claim her before God and the world.’
‘Then your first marriage was a deliberate felony, and a deliberate fraud,’ cried Edward: ‘a felony because it was a bigamous marriage, for which the law of the land could punish you, even now; a fraud because by it you pretended to fulfil the conditions of your cousin’s will, when you were not in a position to comply with them.’
‘Stop, Mr. Edward Clare,’ exclaimed Tom Sampson, whose quick perception had by this time made him master of the case; ‘you are assuming a great deal more than you can sustain. You are going very much too fast. What evidence have you that my client’s first marriage was a legal one? What evidence have you that he was ever married to Mademoiselle Chicot? We know how very loosely tied such alliances are apt to be in that class of life.’
‘How do I know that he was married to her?’ echoed Edward. ‘Why, by his own admission.’
‘My client admits nothing,’ said Sampson with dignity.