believe the noises.' After this explosion Affery put her apron
into her mouth again; always keeping her hand on the window-sill and her
knee on the window-seat, ready to cry out or jump out if her lord and
master approached.

Rigaud had not lost a word of this.

'Haha!' he cried, lifting his eyebrows, folding his arms, and leaning
back in his chair. 'Assuredly, Madame Flintwinch is an oracle! How shall
we interpret the oracle, you and I and the old intriguer? He said that
you were not--? And you burst out and stopped him! What was it you were
not? What is it you are not? Say then, madame!'

Under this ferocious banter, she sat breathing harder, and her mouth was
disturbed. Her lips quivered and opened, in spite of her utmost efforts
to keep them still.

'Come then, madame! Speak, then! Our old intriguer said that you were
not--and you stopped him. He was going to say that you were not--what?
I know already, but I want a little confidence from you. How, then? You
are not what?'

She tried again to repress herself, but broke out vehemently, 'Not
Arthur's mother!'

'Good,' said Rigaud. 'You are amenable.'

With the set expression of her face all torn away by the explosion
of her passion, and with a bursting, from every rent feature, of the
smouldering fire so long pent up, she cried out: 'I will tell it myself!
I will not hear it from your lips, and with the taint of your wickedness
upon it. Since it must be seen, I will have it seen by the light I stood
in. Not another word. Hear me!'

'Unless you are a more obstinate and more persisting woman than even
I know you to be,' Mr Flintwinch interposed, 'you had better leave Mr
Rigaud, Mr Blandois, Mr Beelzebub, to tell it in his own way. What does
it signify when he knows all about it?'

'He does not know all about it.'

'He knows all he cares about it,' Mr Flintwinch testily urged. 'He does
not know me.'

'What do you suppose he cares for you, you conceited woman?' said Mr
Flintwinch.

'I tell you, Flintwinch, I will speak. I tell you when it has come
to this, I will tell it with my own lips, and will express myself
throughout it. What! Have I suffered nothing in this room, no
deprivation, no imprisonment, that I should condescend at last to
contemplate myself in such a glass as that. Can you see him? Can you
hear him? If your wife were a hundred times the ingrate that she is, and
if I were a thousand times more hopeless than I am of inducing her to be
silen