I wore like armour in Robert
Turold's company I dropped altogether at her bedside. Her lucid intervals
were few, but I was not afraid of her recognizing the old Cornish doctor
with his muffler, his glasses, his shaggy white hair and beard. The daily
sight of her shrunken ageing features reminded me that I had nothing to
fear--that Time had effectually disguised us from each other's
recognition. We were old, we two. Life had receded from us--what had we to
do with its fever, its regrets, its passions and futile joys? The clock
had ticked the time away, the fire was dying out, the hearth desolate and
cold. I was resigned before, I was resigned then. I did what I could for
her, which was little enough. Human progress, such as it is, has been
acquired through the spirit. The body defies us--we have no control over
it. So she died--mercifully unconscious most of the time--and died, as I
had hoped, without the least suspicion of the truth.

"You cannot faintly imagine the shock of Turold's announcement on the day
of her burial, to me, who had been so arrogantly certain that the secret
was safe. If you remember what took place at Flint House on that occasion
you will recall that it was a question from me which brought the truth to
light. Your brother's answer awakened my suspicions, and made me
determined to find out what he actually knew. He brought out the truth
then, as I've no doubt now he intended to do in any case.

"The puzzle to me was the exact extent of his knowledge. He knew two
things for certain. One was that I had married Alice before leaving
England, and the other was that I was still alive. But he obviously did
not know that I was Remington. How had he found out the two facts? I
guessed that the woman he believed to be his wife had revealed the secret
of her earlier marriage on her death-bed, but the other was a problem
which I could not solve. Nor did I try to. When I reached home I went mad.
The calmness, the self-repression of thirty years, vanished in an instant
in the monstrous infamy of that disclosure. There was something too
horribly sinister in the character of a man who could be driven by
ambition to make such a disclosure without regret, almost without
hesitation. He sacrificed and put to shame two gentle creatures at the
beck of his implacable mania. For the title he had forfeited tenderness,
pity, decency--all the human attributes--with a brazen and unashamed face.
That man walked the earth alone.