“You remember what he said?”

“I can’t repeat it, Walter.  You shall know directly what he said about you—–­but I can’t repeat what he said to me.  It was worse than the polite insolence of his letter.  My hands tingled to strike him, as if I had been a man!  I only kept them quiet by tearing his card to pieces under my shawl.  Without saying a word on my side, I walked away from the house (for fear of Laura seeing us), and he followed, protesting softly all the way.  In the first by-street I turned, and asked him what he wanted with me.  He wanted two things.  First, if I had no objection, to express his sentiments.  I declined to hear them.  Secondly, to repeat the warning in his letter.  I asked, what occasion there was for repeating it.  He bowed and smiled, and said he would explain.  The explanation exactly confirmed the fears I expressed before you left us.  I told you, if you remember, that Sir Percival would be too headstrong to take his friend’s advice where you were concerned, and that there was no danger to be dreaded from the Count till his own interests were threatened, and he was roused into acting for himself?”

“I recollect, Marian.”

“Well, so it has really turned out.  The Count offered his advice, but it was refused.  Sir Percival would only take counsel of his own violence, his own obstinacy, and his own hatred of you.  The Count let him have his way, first privately ascertaining, in case of his own interests being threatened next, where we lived.  You were followed, Walter, on returning here, after your first journey to Hampshire, by the lawyer’s men for some distance from the railway, and by the Count himself to the door of the house.  How he contrived to escape being seen by you he did not tell me, but he found us out on that occasion, and in that way.  Having made the discovery, he took no advantage of it till the news reached him of Sir Percival’s death, and then, as I told you, he acted for himself, because he believed you would next proceed against the dead man’s partner in the conspiracy.  He at once made his arrangements to meet the owner of the Asylum in London, and to take him to the place where his runaway patient was hidden, believing that the results, whichever way they ended, would be to involve you in interminable legal disputes and difficulties, and to tie your hands for all purposes of offence, so far as he was concerned.  That was his purpose, on his own confession to me.  The only consideration which made him hesitate, at the last moment——­”

“Yes?”

“It is hard to acknowledge it, Walter, and yet I must.  I was the only consideration.  No words can say how degraded I feel in my own estimation when I think of it, but the one weak point in that man’s iron character is the horrible admiration he feels for me.  I have tried, for the sake of my own self-respect, to disbelieve it as long as I could; but his looks, his actions, force on me the