“Then you don’t deny that to-day he is really your friend?” he said, with veiled sarcasm.
“Why should I? Surely there is nothing disgraceful that a man should show friendliness and sympathy towards a woman who yearns for her husband’s love, and is lonely and unhappy, as I have been? Again, I did not leave Treysa with him. He joined my train quite by accident, and we travelled to Vienna together. He left me at the station, and I have not seen him since.”
“When you were in Vienna, a few days before, you actually visited him at his hotel?”
“Certainly; I went to see him just as I should call upon any other friend. I recognised the plot against us, and arranged with him that he should leave the Court and go to Rome.”
“I don’t approve of such friends,” he snapped again quickly.
“A husband should always choose his wife’s male friends. I am entirely in your hands, Ferdinand.”
“But surely you know that a thousand and one scandalous stories have been whispered about you—not only in the palace, but actually among the people. The papers, even, have hinted at your disgraceful and outrageous behaviour.”
“And I have nothing whatever to be ashamed of. You, my husband, I face boldly to-night, and declare to you that I have never, for one single moment, forgotten my duty either to you or to our child,” she said, in a very low, firm voice, hot tears at that moment welling in her beautiful eyes. “I am here to declare my innocence—to demand of you justice, Ferdinand!”
His lips were pressed together. He was watching her intently, noticing how very earnestly and how very boldly she refuted those statements which, in his entire ignorance of the conspiracy, he had believed to be scandalous truths. Was it really possible that she, his wife, whom all Europe had admired for her grace, her sweetness, and her extraordinary beauty, was actually a victim of a deeply-laid plot of Hinckeldeym’s? To him it seemed utterly impossible. She was endeavouring, perhaps, to shield herself by making these counter allegations. A man, he reflected, seldom gets even with a woman’s ingenuity.
“Hinckeldeym has recently revealed to me something else, Claire,” he said, speaking very slowly, his eyes still fixed upon hers—“the existence of another lover, an interesting person who, it appears, is a criminal!”