"Whom was she talking to?"
"The man you asked her about. To Rafael Angelelli."
"Well, but I told her to talk to him."
"An' she did it. But the first time I heard her was just before you told her to."
"That same night?"
"He was in the kitchen with her when you came in. Why, he's here all the time! I don't care what she pretends to you, she's stuck on him, an' every girl in the house knows it."
Rapidly, but as fully as she had sketched the dialogue between Rose and Dyker, she now described the first conversation that she had overheard between her mistress and the Italian.
"I'd come down to graft a drink," she said, "an' I heard them from the stairs. That's how, after he'd left, I came to listen to you too."
Dyker had quailed under the revelation, thus made to him, of political danger. He now quivered in anger at the comments upon himself, somewhat colored, that Violet had placed in the mouths of Rose and Angel.
"I'll find out about this!" he said, struggling against the desperate arms flung swiftly around him to keep him on the sofa. "Let me go! By God, I'll have that drunken cat down here and squeeze the truth out of her throat!"