“Mr. Glazzard.  It was he who laid a plot for your downfall.”

Quarrier moved impatiently.

“Mrs. Wade, you are being played upon by this scoundrel.  There is no end to his contrivances.”

“No, he has told me the truth,” she pursued, with agitated voice.  “Listen to the story, first of all.”

She related to him, in accurate detail, all that had passed between Northway and Mr. Marks.

“And Mr. Marks was Mr. Glazzard, undoubtedly.  His description tallies exactly.”

Denzil broke out indignantly.

“The whole thing is a fabrication I not only won’t believe it, but simply can’t.  You say that you have suspected this?”

“I have—­from the moment when Lilian told me that Mr. Glazzard knew.”

“That’s astounding!—­Then why should you have desired to be on friendly terms with the Glazzards?”

Mrs. Wade sank her eyes.

“I hoped,” she made answer, “to find out something.  I had only in view to serve you.”

“You have deluded yourself, and been deluded, in the strangest way.  Now, I will give you one reason (a very odd, but a very satisfactory one) why it is impossible to believe Glazzard guilty of such baseness—­setting aside the obvious fact that he had no motive.  He goes in for modelling in clay, and for some time he has been busy on a very fine head.  What head do you think?—­That of Judas Iscariot.”

He laughed.

“Now, a man guilty of abominable treachery would not choose for an artistic subject the image of an arch-traitor.”

Mrs. Wade smiled strangely as she listened to his scornful demonstration.

“You have given me,” she said, “a most important piece of evidence in support of Northway’s story.”

Denzil was ill at ease.  He could not dismiss this lady with contempt.  Impossible that he should not have learnt by this time the meaning of her perpetual assiduity on his behalf; the old friendliness (never very warm) had changed to a compassion which troubled him.  Her image revived such painful memories that he would have welcomed any event which put her finally at a distance from him The Polterham scandal, though not yet dead, had never come to his ears; had he known it, he could scarcely have felt more constrained in her society.

“Will you oblige me,” he said, with kindness, “by never speaking of this again?”

“If you will first grant me one test of my Opinion.  Will you meet Northway in some public place where Mr. Glazzard can be easily seen, and ask the man to point out his informant—­Mr. Marks?”

After much debate, and with great reluctance, he consented.  From his conversation of an hour ago he knew that Glazzard would be at the Academy on the morrow.  He had expressed a hope for a meeting there.  At the Academy, accordingly, the test should be applied.  It was all a fabrication; Northway, laying some new plot, might already know Glazzard by sight.  But the latter should be put on his guard, and Mrs. Wade should then be taught that henceforth she was forbidden to concern herself with his—­Quarrier’s—­affairs.