And I had had to pick her up from where she crouched, on a coverlet on my bedroom floor.
But give her a little time—the time to pull herself together—and you could no more have persuaded Madge that it was not so than you could have got Alec to believe it was.
"But why wasn't I told all this at once?" he had demanded, not twice or thrice, but twenty times. "Are you telling me now, or am I wrong in my head? Why didn't you? Why didn't you? Then he could have been put where he belongs—in the asylum yonder——"
And again, and yet again: "You brought him to my house, you brought him to my house! You practically introduced him under a French name—you didn't contradict it anyway—you knew all about him—and I wasn't told—I'm only told after he's stolen my girl! Why didn't you tell me, Coverham?"
But I considered that I had less to reproach myself with than he thought. I had done everything in my power to isolate him, to keep her out of his path. Madge, not I, had asked him to Ker Annic. Madge had invited herself to his hotel in St Briac. He had given me his word, I had trusted to it, and he had broken it. And had I at any time told Alec the truth he would no more have comprehended it than he did now.
So he had railed bitterly on, turning the nightmare over and over again, meeting and re-meeting himself in the mirrors, very much as Derwent Rose had met and re-met himself in the windings of his marvellous life.
"Oh, we're mad! We're all mad! Any chance of our waking up? And you talk to me about somebody called Derwent Rose as if I ought to know all about the fellow the moment you mention his name! I never heard of a Derwent Rose in my life! Who the devil is Derwent Rose anyway?"
This at any rate Madge had been able to tell him.
"But he says he's never written a book in his life! Who should know if he doesn't?"
I made another attempt.