Just as I moved the Count’s persuasive hand was laid on his shoulder, and the Count’s mellifluous voice interposed to quiet him.

“My dear Percival!—­gently—­gently!”

Sir Percival looked round in his angriest manner.  The Count only smiled and repeated the soothing application.

“Gently, my good friend—­gently!”

Sir Percival hesitated, followed me a few steps, and, to my great surprise, offered me an apology.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe,” he said.  “I have been out of order lately, and I am afraid I am a little irritable.  But I should like to know what Mrs. Catherick could possibly want here.  When did she come?  Was the housekeeper the only person who saw her?”

“The only person,” I answered, “so far as I know.”

The Count interposed again.

“In that case why not question the housekeeper?” he said.  “Why not go, Percival, to the fountain-head of information at once?”

“Quite right!” said Sir Percival.  “Of course the housekeeper is the first person to question.  Excessively stupid of me not to see it myself.”  With those words he instantly left us to return to the house.

The motive of the Count’s interference, which had puzzled me at first, betrayed itself when Sir Percival’s back was turned.  He had a host of questions to put to me about Mrs. Catherick, and the cause of her visit to Blackwater Park, which he could scarcely have asked in his friend’s presence.  I made my answers as short as I civilly could, for I had already determined to check the least approach to any exchanging of confidences between Count Fosco and myself.  Laura, however, unconsciously helped him to extract all my information, by making inquiries herself, which left me no alternative but to reply to her, or to appear in the very unenviable and very false character of a depositary of Sir Percival’s secrets.  The end of it was, that, in about ten minutes’ time, the Count knew as much as I know of Mrs. Catherick, and of the events which have so strangely connected us with her daughter, Anne, from the time when Cartright met with her to this day.

The effect of my information on him was, in one respect, curious enough.

Intimately as he knows Sir Percival, and closely as he appears to be associated with Sir Percival’s private affairs in general, he is certainly as far as I am from knowing anything of the true story of Anne Catherick.  The unsolved mystery in connection with this unhappy woman is now rendered doubly suspicious, in my eyes, by the absolute conviction which I feel, that the clue to it has been hidden by Sir Percival from the most intimate friend he has in the world.  It was impossible to mistake the eager curiosity of the Count’s look and manner while he drank in greedily every word that fell from my lips.  There are many kinds of curiosity, I know—­but there is no misinterpreting the curiosity of blank surprise:  if I ever saw it in my life I saw it in the Count’s face.