Sybilla turned toward him and answered, in a voice plainly audible the length and breadth of the, long room:
"She called herself Mrs. Denover. Mr. Parmalee called her his sister.
Both were false. She was Captain Harold Hunsden's divorced wife, Lady
Kingsland's mother, and a lost, degraded outcast!"
CHAPTER XXXI.
FOUND GUILTY.
There was the silence of death. Men looked blankly in each other's faces, then at the prisoner. With an awfully corpse-like face, and wild, dilated eyes, he sat staring at the witness—struck dumb.
The silence was broken by the lawyer.
"This is a very extraordinary statement, Miss Silver," he said. "Are you quite certain of its truth? It is an understood thing that the late Captain Hunsden was a widower."
"He was nothing of the sort. It suited his purpose to be thought so. Captain Hunsden was a very proud man. It is scarcely likely he would announce his bitter shame to the world."
"And his daughter was cognizant of these facts?"
"Only from the night of her father's death. On that night he revealed to her the truth, under a solemn oath of secrecy. Previous to that she had believed her mother dead. That death-bed oath was the cause of all the trouble between Sir Everard and his wife. Lady Kingsland would have died rather than break it."