He turned on her suddenly, and held out the telegram she had received that morning.
"One of the servants picked this up on the breakfast table and brought it to me. What the devil does it mean? If Mark Gifford wanted to see you why couldn't he come here?"
Blanche looked at him dumbly. Had her life depended on her speaking she could not have spoken just then.
He went on: "Have you seen Gifford? Did he say anything about me?"
He uttered the words with a kind of breathless haste. She had the painful feeling that he wanted to put her in the wrong, to quarrel with her. Even as he spoke he was tearing the telegram into small pieces, and casting them down on to the neat, well-kept grass path.
"I suspect I know the business he came about—" He was speaking quietly, collectedly, now, and she felt that he was making a great effort to speak calmly and confidently.
"I don't think, Lionel, that you can know," she answered at last, in an almost inaudible voice.
"Well, let me tell you what it is that I suspect," he said.
There was a long pause. He was looking at her warily, wondering, evidently, as to how far he dared confide in her. And that look of his made her feel sick and faint.
"I suspect," he said at last, "that Gifford came to tell you a cock-and-bull story concocted by my wife's companion, a woman called Julia Pigchalke."