late.'

'You imply,' said Arthur, smarting under these cool-handed thrusts, of
which he had deeply felt the force already, 'that there was something--'

'Mr Clennam,' she composedly interrupted, 'recollect that I do not speak
by implication about the man. He is, I say again without disguise, a low
mercenary wretch. I suppose such a creature goes where there is occasion
for him. If I had not had occasion for him, you would not have seen him
and me together.'

Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case before
him, of which there was a half-hidden shadow in his own breast, Clennam
was silent.

'I have spoken of him as still living,' she added, 'but he may have been
put out of the way for anything I know. For anything I care, also. I
have no further occasion for him.'

With a heavy sigh and a despondent air, Arthur Clennam slowly rose.

She did not rise also, but said, having looked at him in the meanwhile
with a fixed look of suspicion, and lips angrily compressed:

'He was the chosen associate of your dear friend, Mr Gowan, was he not?
Why don't you ask your dear friend to help you?'

The denial that he was a dear friend rose to Arthur's lips; but he
repressed it, remembering his old struggles and resolutions, and said:

'Further than that he has never seen Blandois since Blandois set out for
England, Mr Gowan knows nothing additional about him. He was a chance
acquaintance, made abroad.'

'A chance acquaintance made abroad!' she repeated. 'Yes. Your dear
friend has need to divert himself with all the acquaintances he can
make, seeing what a wife he has. I hate his wife, sir.'

The anger with which she said it, the more remarkable for being so much
under her restraint, fixed Clennam's attention, and kept him on the
spot. It flashed out of her dark eyes as they regarded him, quivered in
her nostrils, and fired the very breath she exhaled; but her face was
otherwise composed into a disdainful serenity; and her attitude was as
calmly and haughtily graceful as if she had been in a mood of complete
indifference.

'All I will say is, Miss Wade,' he remarked, 'that you can have received
no provocation to a feeling in which I believe you have no sharer.'

'You may ask your dear friend, if you choose,' she returned, 'for his
opinion upon that subject.'

'I am scarcely on those intimate terms with my dear friend,' said
Arthur, in spite of his resolutions, 'that would render my approaching
the s