Kean picked it up and examined it.
“So you’ve stumbled on that, too. You’ve been pretty thorough, Hatter.”
“You knew, then?”
“That Sybil’s first husband was alive? I’ve known it for the last six years. As a matter of fact, I fetched him from Germany myself and placed him in an asylum in Dorset. You know he’s hopelessly insane, I suppose. Three specialists have pronounced him incurable.”
“You’ve lived with Sybil for six years, knowing all the time that Gerald Lee was alive?”
Kean looked at him with frank speculation in his eyes.
“What would you have done in my place, I wonder,” he said quietly. “Sybil’s heart was in such a state that any shock might prove fatal. Lee was hopelessly insane, incapable even of recognizing her. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the mere sight of him would have killed her. Rather than take the chance of the knowledge of his existence reaching her now, I would kill you, here in this room, with my own hands, and take the consequences.”
He spoke quite gently, but his voice carried conviction and Fayre realized that he would shrink from nothing in the effort to spare his wife.
“Sybil knows,” he said and, even as he spoke, he felt that he would have given anything to unsay the words.
For the first time Kean’s composure deserted him. His face became suddenly grey and lined. “Impossible!”