“In the first place, I demand a full confession of the conspiracy, written and signed in my presence by yourself.”

He raised his finger again.  “One!” he said, checking me off with the steady attention of a practical man.

“In the second place, I demand a plain proof, which does not depend on your personal asseveration, of the date at which my wife left Blackwater Park and travelled to London.”

“So! so! you can lay your finger, I see, on the weak place,” he remarked composedly.  “Any more?”

“At present, no more.”

“Good! you have mentioned your terms, now listen to mine.  The responsibility to myself of admitting what you are pleased to call the ‘conspiracy’ is less, perhaps, upon the whole, than the responsibility of laying you dead on that hearthrug.  Let us say that I meet your proposal—­on my own conditions.  The statement you demand of me shall be written, and the plain proof shall be produced.  You call a letter from my late lamented friend informing me of the day and hour of his wife’s arrival in London, written, signed, and dated by himself, a proof, I suppose?  I can give you this.  I can also send you to the man of whom I hired the carriage to fetch my visitor from the railway, on the day when she arrived—­his order-book may help you to your date, even if his coachman who drove me proves to be of no use.  These things I can do, and will do, on conditions.  I recite them.  First condition!  Madame Fosco and I leave this house when and how we please, without interference of any kind on your part.  Second condition!  You wait here, in company with me, to see my agent, who is coming at seven o’clock in the morning to regulate my affairs.  You give my agent a written order to the man who has got your sealed letter to resign his possession of it.  You wait here till my agent places that letter unopened in my hands, and you then allow me one clear half-hour to leave the house—­after which you resume your own freedom of action and go where you please.  Third condition!  You give me the satisfaction of a gentleman for your intrusion into my private affairs, and for the language you have allowed yourself to use to me at this conference.  The time and place, abroad, to be fixed in a letter from my hand when I am safe on the Continent, and that letter to contain a strip of paper measuring accurately the length of my sword.  Those are my terms.  Inform me if you accept them—­Yes or No.”

The extraordinary mixture of prompt decision, far-sighted cunning, and mountebank bravado in this speech, staggered me for a moment—­ and only for a moment.  The one question to consider was, whether I was justified or not in possessing myself of the means of establishing Laura’s identity at the cost of allowing the scoundrel who had robbed her of it to escape me with impunity.  I knew that the motive of securing the just recognition of my wife in the birthplace from which she had been driven out as an impostor,