“Did you and she see each other—ha! I’ve got it now—did you see each other after I had left the town? No prevarication! You own to telling Helena that you knew her by her likeness to her mother. You must have seen her mother. Where?”
I made another effort to defend myself. He again refused furiously to hear me. It was useless to persist. Whatever the danger that threatened me might be, the sooner it showed itself the easier I should feel. I told him that Mrs. Gracedieu had called on me, after he and his wife had left the town.
“Do you mean to tell me,” he cried, “that she came to you?”
“I do.”
After that answer, he no longer required the paper to help him. He threw it from him on the floor.
“And you received her,” he said, “without inquiring whether I knew of her visit or not? Guilty deception on your part—guilty deception on her part. Oh, the hideous wickedness of it!”
When his mad suspicion that I had been his wife’s lover betrayed itself in this way, I made a last attempt, in the face of my own conviction that it was hopeless, to place my conduct and his wife’s conduct before him in the true light.
“Mrs. Gracedieu’s object was to consult me—” Before I could say the next words, I saw him put his hand into the pocket of his dressing-gown.
“An innocent man,” he sternly declared, “would have told me that my wife had been to see him—you kept it a secret. An innocent woman would have given me a reason for wishing to go to you—she kept it a secret, when she left my house; she kept it a secret when she came back.”
“Mr. Gracedieu, I insist on being heard! Your wife’s motive—”