“Will nothing induce you to defer the close of this inquiry—so far as you are concerned—for four-and-twenty hours?”
“Either you or I, Sir Patrick, must say what is to be said, and do what is to be done, before we leave this room.”
“Give me the letter.”
She gave it to him. Mr. Moy whispered to his client, “Do you know what that is?” Geoffrey shook his head. “Do you really remember nothing about it?” Geoffrey answered in one surly word, “Nothing!”
Sir Patrick addressed himself to the assembled company.
“I have to ask your pardon,” he said, “for abruptly leaving the room, and for obliging Miss Silvester to leave it with me. Every body present, except that man” (he pointed to Geoffrey), “will, I believe, understand and forgive me, now that I am forced to make my conduct the subject of the plainest and the fullest explanation. I shall address that explanation, for reasons which will presently appear, to my niece.”
Blanche started. “To me!” she exclaimed.
“To you,” Sir Patrick answered.
Blanche turned toward Arnold, daunted by a vague sense of something serious to come. The letter that she had received from her husband on her departure from Ham Farm had necessarily alluded to relations between Geoffrey and Anne, of which Blanche had been previously ignorant. Was any reference coming to those relations? Was there something yet to be disclosed which Arnold’s letter had not prepared her to hear?
Sir Patrick resumed.