She did not flinch a muscle.

“I know it, it is the result of pitting myself against that girl; but pray, Sir John, what are you?  Was it not you who devised the scheme?”

“You are right, I did, to trap two fools.  Anne, I have waited twenty years, but you have met your master at last.”

Lady Bellamy made a slight exclamation and relapsed into silence.

“My plot has worked well.  Already one of you is dead, and for you a fate is reserved that is worse than death.  You are henceforth a penniless outcast, left at forty-two to the tender mercies of the wide world.”

“Explain yourself a little.”

“With pleasure.  For years I have submitted to your contumely, longing to be revenged, waiting to be revenged.  You thought me a fool, I know, and compared with you I am; but you do not understand what an amount of hatred even a fool is capable of.  For twenty years, Lady Bellamy, I have hated you, you will never know how much, though perhaps what I am going to say may give you some idea.  I very well knew what terms you were on with George Caresfoot, you never took any pains to hide them from me, you only hid the proofs.  I soon discovered indeed that your marriage to me was nothing but a blind, that I was being used as a screen forsooth.  But your past I could never fathom.  I don’t look like a revengeful man, but for all that I have for years sought many ways to ruin you both, yet from one thing and another they all failed, till a blessed chance made that brute’s blind passion the instrument of his own destruction, and put you into my hands.  You little thought when you told me all that story, and begged my advice, how I was revelling in the sense that, proud woman as you are, it must have been an agony of humiliation for you to have to tell it.  It was an instructive scene that, it assured me of what I suspected before that George Caresfoot must have you bound to him by some stronger ties than those of affection, that he must hold you in a grip of iron.  It made me think, too, that if by any means I could acquire the same power, I too should be able to torture you.”

For the first time Lady Bellamy looked up.

“Am I tiring you,” he said, politely, “or shall I go on?”

“Go on.”

“With your permission, I will ring for a glass of sherry—­no, claret, the day is too hot for sherry,” and he rang.

The claret was brought and he drank a glass, remarking with an affectation of coolness that it was a sound wine for a pound a dozen; then he proceeded.

“The first thing I have to call your attention to is this Arthur Heigham plot.  At first it may appear that I am involved with you; I am not.  There is not, now that George Caresfoot is dead, one tittle of evidence against me except your own, and who will believe you? You are inculpated up to the eyes; you delivered the forged letter, I can prove that you cozened the ring out of Heigham, and you told Philip:  there is no escape for you, and I have already taken an opportunity to renounce any responsibility for your acts.  At the inquest I shall appear to give evidence against you, and then I shall abandon you to your fate.”