“I once did you a service,” he said; “and you once told me you were not an ungrateful man. Are you grateful enough to answer me if I ask you something?”
He waited a little again. Mr. Bashwood still stood trembling at the fireplace, silently watching him.
“I see you looking at me,” he went on. “Is there some change in me that I am not conscious of myself? Am I seeing things that you don’t see? Am I hearing words that you don’t hear? Am I looking or speaking like a man out of his senses?”
Again he waited, and again the silence was unbroken. His eyes began to glitter; and the savage blood that he had inherited from his mother rose dark and slow in his ashy cheeks.
“Is that woman,” he asked, “the woman whom you once knew, whose name was Miss Gwilt?”
Once more his wife collected her fatal courage. Once more his wife spoke her fatal words.
“You compel me to repeat,” she said, “that you are presuming on our acquaintance, and that you are forgetting what is due to me.”
He turned upon her, with a savage suddenness which forced a cry of alarm from Mr. Bashwood’s lips.
“Are you, or are you not, My Wife?” he asked, through his set teeth.
She raised her eyes to his for the first time. Her lost spirit looked at him, steadily defiant, out of the hell of its own despair.