“You have a right, Clifton, the greatest of all rights, but I beg of you to remain patient,” she answered calmly. “There are reasons why I must still preserve a silence on this matter—reasons which some day you will know.”
“Does this man love you?”
She shrugged her shoulders and extended her thin, white hands vaguely.
“And he is jealous of me!” I cried. “He attempted to kill you because you came here to me.”
“Remain in patience, I beg of you,” she said imploringly. “Make no surmises, for you cannot guess the truth. It is an enigma to which I myself have no key.”
“The name of the man who has attempted to murder you is Hibbert,” I observed, annoyed at her persistent concealment of the truth. “He is the man who was your lover. You can’t deny it.”
She raised her beautiful eyes for a moment to mine, then said simply—
“Surely you trust me, Clifton?”
Her question drove home to me the fact that my suspicion was ill-founded, and that jealousy in this affair was untimely and unnecessary. I, however, could not rid myself of the thought that Hibbert, this lover she had discarded, had attempted to wreak a deadly revenge. All the circumstances pointed to it, for he would know the whereabouts of my chambers, if not from Muriel previously, then from Aline, that woman whom once in my hearing he had urged to the commission of a crime.
“I trust you implicitly, Muriel,” I answered. “But in this matter I am determined that the man whose hand struck you down shall answer for his crime to me.”