“Words! Phrases!” he cried. “What we want are proofs to the contrary.... Something to disprove the evidence that my eyes gave me.”
“What use would it be to defend myself? You have made up your minds.”
“We have made them up because you are guilty.”
“Guilty of pursuing the same end as you; yes, that I admit. And that is the reason why you committed that shameful action of coming to spy upon me and play that comedy of love. If you were caught by your own snare, all the worse for you. If you have revealed to me facts about the enigma, of which I already knew the existence from the document of Cagliostro, all the worse for you! Now it is an obsession with me; and I have sworn to attain that end, whatever happens, in spite of you. That and that only is my crime—in your eyes.”
“Your crime is murder,” asserted Beaumagnan, who was again losing his temper.
“I have not murdered anyone,” she said firmly.
“You pushed Saint-Hébert over the cliff; you fractured d’Isneauval’s skull.”
“Saint-Hébert? D’Isneauval? I never knew them. I hear their names for the first time to-day,” she protested.
“And me! And me!” he exclaimed violently. “Didn’t you know me? Didn’t you try to poison me?”
“No.”