"Mr. Drelincourt his wife's murderer? No! No!" The words were uttered almost in a shriek.
"That is what he has confessed to being."
"Then he has confessed to a falsehood. It is not true, I tell you. I can prove it. Mr. Drelincourt had no more hand in his wife's death than you or I had."
Rodd pinched his arm as if to convince himself that he was really awake. Was Mrs. Jenwyn in her right mind? Was she not laboring under one of those strange hallucinations to which some persons seem constitutionally liable? Perhaps she would tell him, in addition, that she herself was really the criminal!
Was there a word of truth in what she had just asseverated with such extraordinary emphasis? He greatly doubted it. And yet if there should be! The mere thought of such a thing turned him dizzy.
A burning curiosity got the better of his discretion. "The real criminal was----" He paused for a moment, as if expecting Mrs. Jenwyn to fill up the hiatus.
"Pardon me, Mr. Marsh," she said, "but what I have to reveal must first of all be told Mr. Drelincourt. When that has been done, the affair will be out of my hands. But you, in your turn, can tell me something, provided there is no objection to your doing so. By what circumstances was Mr. Drelincourt influenced in coming to his strange determination to charge himself with the commission of a crime of which he is wholly guiltless?"
Rodd told himself that, although she had not answered his question, there was no reason why he should not answer hers.
"In early life Mr. Drelincourt was addicted to walking in his sleep, and it was while he was in one of his fits of somnambulism that he believed himself to have been guilty of the death of his wife. I need not trouble you with the details of the evidence which seemed to bring the crime irresistibly home to him; it will be enough to remark that both to him and me--for all the particulars of the affair have been known to me from the first--it appeared absolutely conclusive. And yet, Mrs. Jenwyn, you now assert, and in the most positive terms, that Mr. Drelincourt's belief had absolutely no foundation of fact!"
"I do assert it, and at the proper time and place I shall be prepared to prove my words."