"No, she is not. It was she that was said to have been one of your—your friends, until she made friends with your political enemies. The girl that told me was, of course, the Mary Morton I have mentioned. She said that you were intimate with this Mrs. Légère, and I understood that even Mary——"
Dyker was genuinely glad to find some accusation that he could deny with truth.
"Never!" he cried.
Something in that word and his utterance of it made her look at him hard.
"She didn't want to tell the story," Marian insisted. "I got it from her. How could it have been the result of malice or a plot? Didn't I tell you that she said you had rescued her from the Légère woman's house?"
Dyker reflected. He wished that he had been as sweeping in his discrediting of Violet, under the pseudonym of Mary Morton, as he had been in his discrediting of Rose. Failing that, he might even have explained this rescue and have become something of a hero. Both opportunities were, however, gone. He must make the best of what remained.
"Marian," he said, speaking slowly, quite calmly, and with no small appearance of sincerity of purpose, "I needn't bring you any proof of this Légère woman's bad character—the qualities of that character you yourself know—and as for this Morton girl, I can only fall back on what I have already pointed out to you. You say she confesses her evil life: how can you, then, credit anything an admittedly abandoned creature may have told you?"
"Can't the worst of women tell the truth sometimes?"
"Practically never."
"But,"—Marian passed a weary hand across her forehead—"how could this girl be in a position to know what she says she knows, if she hadn't led just the kind of life that you say makes her an inevitable liar?"