The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity:
"Same man!"
Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was the same man. The tense muscles of his face told nothing. Bingo added:
"—But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount to little compared with the wrong and injury inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham! That—— Good Lord! what's the matter?"
For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue lips:
"What wrong? What injury? What—what are you hinting at?——"
"Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round light blue eyes was so palpably genuine that the crazy flame died out of the Doctor's, and his clenched hand dropped. "I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all!"
"I beg your pardon, Major!" Saxham picked up his chair and sat down on it, inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. "My nerves have been giving trouble of late."
Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright eyes, the Doctor looked like that—uncommonly like that! And the big Major, remembering Alderman Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the stiff, blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have reverted to the old vice? "Bad for the girl he's married if he has!" he thought, even as he said:
"Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' the tension, don't you know? Norway in June, or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind and go!"