It was a long time before she could steady her trembling lips to speak, and when she did the words were so low that he could only just catch them.
“Nothing. I have been a terribly extravagant woman. I have lost large sums of money at cards. You never guessed that I was a secret gambler—there is not a year in which I have not overstepped my allowance, generous as it was. I was afraid to come to you.”
He silenced her with a scornful wave of the hand. “Lies, lies, every word you have uttered! You have done none of these things you pretend; it is an excuse you have invented in your desperation.”
He drew himself up to his full height and pointed a menacing finger at the stricken woman. “Will you tell me where these thousands have gone? No, you are silent. Well then, I will tell you—not in gambling debts, not in unnecessary personal luxuries—no, if it were so I would be readier to forgive. They have gone to support the extravagance of that wretched idler and spendthrift who is known by the name of Archie Brookes. Do you dare to deny it?”
She recognized that he knew too much, that further prevarication was useless. “I do not deny it,” she answered in a moaning voice.
And after a little pause he proceeded with his denunciation.
“It is as well that you do not, seeing I know everything. Well, bad as that is, there is worse behind. I have learned more; I know that you, in conjunction with that smooth scoundrel Clayton-Brookes, have practised upon me, upon all your friends, a gross and impudent fraud in passing off this young profligate as your nephew.”
She made a last attempt to defend her crumbling position. “Who dares to say that?” But her ashen lips, her trembling voice proved her guilt.
“You deceived me when I married you with a fictitious account of your family—the only truth in your many statements being that your father was a clever artist of dissolute habits. I know now that you were an only child and that your mother died when she gave you birth; it is therefore impossible you can have a nephew. The same applies to your confederate. He had no sisters, and his two brothers died bachelors. I would demand from you the motives of this fraud, but I know you will refuse to confess them. Well, I can wait. The people who have unmasked you so far will unmask you still farther, and in time I shall know all in spite of your obstinate silence.”
She said nothing for a long time. When she spoke it was in a voice of resigned despair. “What do you intend to do?”