The girl started, perceiving that trouble was threatening from still another quarter. She was conscious that her visitor noticed her start, but in spite of it she could not prevent her pulses throbbing unpleasantly.
"My husband? What do you mean?"
"Oh, you know what I mean well enough, don't try acting the stupid with me. You're not so dull as all that, nor yet so simple; and I'm not if you are. Mrs Champion, I've come to see your husband, Mr Robert Champion, my old friend Bob."
"He's not here, you know he's not here."
"How do I know he's not here? I know he came here."
"How do you know he came here?"
"Because me and my husband met him outside the gate of Wandsworth Prison the Saturday morning he came out of it from doing his sentence. His wife ought to have been there--that's you! but you wasn't! I suppose you were on your couch of rose-leaves and didn't want to be disturbed. Nice idea of a wife's duties you seem to have, and a pretty sort you are to want to look down on me. Poor fellow! he was in sad trouble, without a penny in his pocket, or a chance of getting one, and him with the richest woman in England for his wife. When we told him of the luck you'd had--"
"So it was you who told him, was it?"
"Yes, it was, and I daresay you'd have rather we hadn't; you'd have rather he'd starved and got into trouble again, and rotted out his life in gaol. But Darcy and me were his true friends, if his own wife wasn't. We weren't going to see him hungry in the gutter while you were gorging yourself on the fat of the land. We gave him a good meal, he wanted it, poor chap; nothing but skin and bone he was. We told him all about you, and where you lived, put him inside a new suit of clothes, clothed him in new things from head to foot, we did, so that you shouldn't think he disgraced you by his appearance, and gave him the money to come down here; and he came."
"Well?"