,
when you have not rested after your journey? Only one question to-night,
and I will leave the rest till to-morrow. What did Lady Clarinda say
about Mrs. Beauly? All that you wanted to hear?"

"All, and more," I answered.

"What? what? what?" he cried wild with impatience in a moment.

Mr. Playmore's last prophetic words were vividly present to my mind. He
had declared, in the most positive manner, that Dexter would persist in
misleading me, and would show no signs of astonishment when I repeated
what Lady Clarinda had told me of Mrs. Beauly. I resolved to put
the lawyer's prophecy--so far as the question of astonishment was
concerned--to the sharpest attainable test. I said not a word to
Miserrimus Dexter in the way of preface or preparation: I burst on him
with my news as abruptly as possible.

"The person you saw in the corridor was not Mrs. Beauly," I said. "It
was the maid, dressed in her mistress's cloak and hat. Mrs. Beauly
herself was not in the house at all. Mrs. Beauly herself was dancing at
a masked ball in Edinburgh. There is what the maid told Lady Clarinda;
and there is what Lady Clarinda told _me._"

In the absorbing interest of the moment, I poured out those words one
after another as fast as they would pass my lips. Miserrimus Dexter
completely falsified the lawyer's prediction. He shuddered under the
shock. His eyes opened wide with amazement. "Say it again!" he cried. "I
can't take it all in at once. You stun me."

I was more than contented with this result--I triumphed in my victory.
For once, I had really some reason to feel satisfied with myself. I
had taken the Christian and merciful side in my discussion with Mr.
Playmore; and I had won my reward. I could sit in the same room with
Miserrimus Dexter, and feel the blessed conviction that I was not
breathing the same air with a poisoner. Was it not worth the visit to
Edinburgh to have made sure of that?

In repeating, at his own desire, what I had already said to him, I took
care to add the details which made Lady Clarinda's narrative coherent
and credible. He listened throughout with breathless attention--here and
there repeating the words after me, to impress them the more surely and
the more deeply on his mind.

"What is to be said? what is to be done?" he asked, with a look of blank
despair. "I can't disbelieve it. From first to last, strange as it is,
it sounds true."

(How would Mr. Playmore have felt if he had heard those words? I