"He speaks for me," she repeated, not noticing the interruption, "and if you will not believe a living witness, then you must believe a dead one. Uncle Raynor and Harry said this morning that the Count de Louvisan's body had been found, not lying on the ground, but lifted up and spiked to the wall; and you who claim to have seen me in that house last night claim also to have searched the place and found no one but me present. Will you tell me, then, how I could possibly have lifted the body of a man weighing ten or eleven stone at the least computation, much less have lifted it high enough to spike it to a wall?"
"One for the girl!" commented Cleek silently.
"You might have had help; there might have been somebody there who left before I arrived," replied Geoff.
"And another one for the man!" Cleek was obliged to admit. "Which of this interesting pair is doing the lying? They can't both be speaking the truth. At least, they can't unless—— By Jupiter! Hum-m-m! Quite so! Quite so! 'Write me down an ass, gentlemen,' and an ass with a capital A." Then the curious one-sided smile travelled up his cheek, and lingered there longer than usual.
Young Clavering's last remark had hurt the girl more than anything he had yet said; hurt her so deeply that she gave a little shuddering cry and, womanlike, broke into tears.
"That is the wickedest thing of all!" she said. "The very wickedest thing of all. I can't doubt any longer that you have made up your mind to bolster up this abominable thing by every possible insult to me!"
"Insult? What funny things are sometimes said by accident!" he flung back stridently. "I am likely to 'insult' you when I'm ready to stand by you through thick and thin, am I not? And to lie till I'm black in the face, so that I keep others from knowing what I know!"
"You don't know it—you can't know it! It never happened! I was not in that house last night, and you did not see me there!"
"Oh, well then, let us say I didn't," impatiently. "What does it matter one way or the other? Say I didn't, then! Say I murdered him; but, for God's sake, don't say I insult you when I have come here merely to show you how much I love you—how ready I am to fight the whole world for you. Come back into my arms, and let me tell you what I want to tell, dear. Come back, and don't fear anything or anybody on earth. They shan't touch you! They shan't lift a finger to harm you, say one single word against you; and God help the first that tries it, that's all! A man doesn't cease to love a woman just because she does a desperate thing for his sake. No, not he! If he's worthy of the name of man, he loves her all the better for it. That's how I love you! Better to-day than I ever loved you in all the days that were; better than I shall ever love anything in all the days that are to be. I don't care if you are red with the blood of a hundred men, you're the girl I love, the girl I mean to marry, the girl I'm going to stand up and fight for as long as there's breath left in my body!"
"Marry—marry?" Her voice struck through his even before he had finished speaking, and there was a sting in it that bit. "Do you think for one instant that I would marry you when you make such a charge as that against me? Do you think I would? Do you? I'd no more marry you than I would cut off my right hand, Geoff Clavering, after you have slandered me and lied about me like this."