"My own," Gifford repeated steadfastly.
"May one ask what you mean by that?"
Henshaw's contemptuous incredulity was by no means diminished even by the other's confident attitude.
Gifford gave a short laugh. "Naturally you do not take my meaning.
Obviously you think I am not a competent witness, that I know nothing
except by hearsay. You are, extraordinary as it may seem, quite wrong.
My testimony would be of nothing but what I myself saw and heard."
"What do you mean?" Henshaw had for a moment seemed to be calculating the probability of this monstrous suggestion being a fact, and had dismissed it with the contempt which showed itself in his question.
"I mean," Gifford replied with quiet assurance, "that I happened to be a witness of the interview in the tower-room between your brother and Miss Morriston, that I was there when he received his death-wound, and that it was I whom the girl Haynes saw descending by a rope from the top window."
Henshaw had started to his feet, his face working with an almost passionate astonishment. "You—you tell me all that," he cried, "and expect me to believe it?"
"I have told you and shall tell you nothing," was the cool reply, "that I am not prepared to state on oath in the witness-box."
For a while Henshaw seemed without the power to reply, dumbfounded, as his active brain tried to realize the probabilities of the declaration. "It seems to me," he said at length in a voice of which he was scarcely master, "that, whether your statement is true or otherwise, you are placing yourself in an uncommonly dangerous position, Mr. Gifford."
"I am aware that I am inviting a certain amount of ugly suspicion," Gifford agreed, "but the truth, which might have remained a mystery, has been forced from me by the necessity of protecting Miss Morriston. Perhaps you had better hear a frank account of the whole story, and the explanation of what I admit you are so far justified in setting down as concocted and wildly improbable."