‘Your child, sir!  She is my wife, my wife, my wife!’ Trevelyan, as he spoke, advanced close up to his father-in-law; and at last hissed out his words, with his lips close to Sir Marmaduke’s face.  ’Your right in her is gone, sir.  She is mine, mine, mine!  And you see the way in which she has treated me, Mr Glascock.  Everything I had was hers; but the words of a grey-haired sinner were sweeter to her than all my love.  I wonder whether you think that it is a pleasant thing for such a one as I to come out here and live in such a place as this?  I have not a friend, a companion, hardly a book.  There is nothing that I can eat or drink!  I do not stir out of the house, and I am ill, very ill!  Look at me.  See what she has brought me to!  Mr Glascock, on my honour as a man, I never wronged her in a thought or a word.’

Mr Glascock had come to think that his best chance of doing any good was to get Trevelyan into conversation with himself, free from the interruption of Sir Marmaduke.  The father of the injured woman could not bring himself to endure the hard words that were spoken of his daughter.  During this last speech he had broken out once or twice; but Trevelyan, not heeding him, had clung to Mr Glascock’s arm.  ’Sir Marmaduke,’ said he, ‘would you not like to see the boy?’

‘He shall not see the boy,’ said Trevelyan.  ’You may see him.  He shall not.  What is he that he should have control over me?’

‘This is the most fearful thing I ever heard of,’ said Sir Marmaduke.  ‘What are we to do with him?’

Mr Glascock whispered a few words to Sir Marmaduke, and then declared that he was ready to be taken to the child.  ‘And he will remain here?’ asked Trevelyan..  A pledge was then given by Sir Marmaduke that he would not force his way farther into the house, and the two other men left the chamber together.  Sir Marmaduke, as he paced up and down the room alone, perspiring at every pore, thoroughly uncomfortable and ill at ease, thought of all the hard positions of which he had ever read, and that his was harder than them all.  Here was a man married to his daughter, in possession of his daughter’s child, manifestly mad, and yet he could do nothing to him!  He was about to return to the seat of his government, and he must leave his own child in this madman’s power!  Of course, his daughter could not go with him, leaving her child in this madman’s hands.  He had been told that even were he to attempt to prove the man to be mad in Italy, the process would be slow; and, before it could be well commenced, Trevelyan would be off with the child elsewhere.  There never was an embarrassment, thought Sir Marmaduke, out of which it was so impossible to find a clear way.