‘Only that I know no more who killed her than you do,’ answered John Treverton. ‘I did a foolish thing, perhaps a cowardly thing, when I left the house that night, with the determination never to return to it; but if you could know how intolerable my old life had become to me, you would hardly wonder that I took the first opportunity of getting away from it.’
‘We had better look at things from a business point of view,’ said Mr. Sampson. ‘We are not going to do anything in a hurry. There will always be time enough for you to surrender the estate, Mr. Treverton, and to acknowledge yourself guilty of bigamy. But before you take such a step we may as well make ourselves sure of our facts. You married Mademoiselle Chicot in Paris.’
‘Yes, on the eighteenth of May, sixty-eight. We were married at the Mairie. There was no other ceremony.’
‘Under what name were you married?’
‘My own, naturally. It was only afterwards that I got to be known by my wife’s name.’
‘Were you known to many people in Paris by your own name?’
‘To very few. I had written in the newspapers under a nom de plume,—my sketches at that time were all signed “Jack.” I was generally known as Jack, and after my marriage I became Jack Chicot.’
‘How much did you know of your wife’s antecedents?’
‘Very little, except that she had come to Paris from Auray, in Brittany, about five years before I married her; that she lived reputably, although surrounded by much that was disreputable.’
‘But of her life in Brittany you knew nothing?’