"Who do you suppose? Denis has told me quite a lot about you. Hasn't he told you a lot about me?"
"Yes; but it wasn't all of it true."
Gardiner burst out laughing. "Well, that is good! How do you know?"
"Oh, it's, it's—it's obvious," said Lettice, with an exasperated wave of the hand to help out her meaning. She began to sew very fast. Gardiner contemplated her with a broad smile; but presently it faded, and he turned over and lay plucking at the grass.
"Did Miss O'Connor leave her address with you?"
Lettice shook her head.
"She went off in such a hurry!"
Gardiner opened his mouth to speak, and checked himself for a garrulous fool. He did not know why he had mentioned Dorothea at all. A moment later the impulse came again, and he found himself, to his surprise, telling Lettice the very thing he had decided not to mention. "Rather a queer thing about that young lady," he remarked lightly. "I found out—to be exact, she hurled the fact in my teeth—that she wasn't a Miss, and that O'Connor wasn't her name. She was a widow—a Mrs. Trent."
"Mrs. Trent? What, the, the—"
"Oh, you know about her, do you? Yes, the Mrs. Trent of Easedale. She's firmly persuaded that I killed her husband. I believe she came over here simply and solely in order to worm some sort of confession out of me."