'Really, lady, this is a very extraordinary question.'
'I am sorry, madam, but I must repeat it.'
'Then I answer, certainly not.'
'Not on the very day of Lady Charlotte's death?'
The flush had faded in an instant, and a deathly face was before me. His dry lips could not speak the 'No'which I saw rather than heard.
'Surely your memory deceives you,' said I. 'I could even quote a passage of your letter. It ran 'Please, please, as you are a gentlewoman, burn this letter, and be at the gate by ten o'clock.' '
I thought that he had fainted, but he recovered himself by a supreme effort.
'Is there no such thing as a gentlewoman?' he gasped.
'You do Lady Charlotte an injustice. She did burn the letter. But sometimes a letter may be legible even when burned. You acknowledge now that you wrote it?'
'Yes, I did write it,' he cried, pouring out his soul in a torrent of words. 'I did write it. Why should I deny it? I have no reason to be ashamed of it. I wished her to help me. I believed that if I had an interview I could gain her help, so I asked her to meet me.'
'But why at such an hour?'
'Because I had only just learned that she was going to London next day and might be away for months. There were reasons why I could not get there earlier.'
'But why a rendezvous in the garden instead of a visit to the house?'
'Do you think a man could go alone at that hour to a bachelor's house?'
'Well, what happened when you did get there?'
'I never went.'
'Lyons!'
'No, I swear it to you on all I hold sacred. I never went. Something intervened to prevent my going.'
'What was that?'
'That is a private matter. I cannot tell it.'
'You acknowledge then that you made an appointment with Lady Charlotte at the very hour and place at which she met her death, but you deny that you kept the appointment.'
'That is the truth.'
Again and again I cross-questioned him, but I could never get past that point.
'Lyons,' said I, as I rose from this long and inconclusive interview, 'you are taking a very great responsibility and putting yourself in a very false position by not making an absolutely clean breast of all that you know. If I have to call in the aid of the police you will find how seriously you are compromised. If your position is innocent, why did you in the first instance deny having written to Lady Charlotte upon that date?'
'Because I feared that some false conclusion might be drawn from it and that I might find myself involved in a scandal.'
'And why were you so pressing that Lady Charlotte should destroy your letter?'
'If you have read the letter you will know.'
'I did not say that I had read all the letter.'
'You quoted some of it.'
'I