“They are not broken. They will hold me to my dying hour.”
“Yes, to a madman and a murderer.”
CHAPTER VIII.
NOT PROVEN.
Mildred stood speechless for some moments after those words of Castellani’s, looking at him with kindling eyes.
“How dare you?” she cried at last. “How dare you accuse my husband—the noblest of men?”
“The noblest of men do strange things sometimes upon an evil impulse, and when they are not quite right here,” touching his forehead.
“My husband, George Greswold, is too high a mark for your malignity. Do you think you can make me believe evil of him after fourteen years of married life? His intellect is the clearest and the soundest I have ever found in man or woman. You can no more shake my faith in his power of brain than in his goodness of heart.”
“Perhaps not. The George Greswold you know is a gentleman of commanding intellect and unblemished character. But the George Ransome whom I knew seventeen years ago was a gentleman who was shrewdly suspected of having made away with his wife; and who was confined in a public asylum in the environs of Nice as a dangerous lunatic. If you doubt these facts, you have only to go to Nice, or to St. Jean, where Mr. Ransome and his wife lived for some time in a turtle-dove retirement, which ended tragically. Seventeen years does not obliterate the evidence of such a tragedy as that in which your husband was chief actor.”
“I do not believe one word—and I hope I may never hear your voice again,” said Mildred, with her hand on the electric bell.
She did not remove her hand till her servant, the courier, opened the door. A look told him his duty. Castellani took up his hat without a word; and Albrecht deferentially attended him to the landing, and politely whistled for the lift to convey him to the vestibule below.