"You are a strange man!" she cried, holding the curtain behind her lightly as she turned towards him. "You could make friends with me so that all the world might see you, and meanwhile, at the very same time, you were paying a low Italian scoundrel to produce lies against my sick and lonely mother! You could watch me and get out of me all you wanted to know because I was ignorant of the world. You could use the horrible influence you had gained over me by your experience of many women, to manage me as you liked. You told me not to marry Edgar Tonmore for some reason of your own; you told me to go and stay with my aunt; you came to see me one night in London, and wormed out of me my relations with my unfortunate mother. With all your knowledge of the world, with all your experience, did you never think I might come to find you out?" Molly paused for a moment. She held herself erect, her white gown crushed against the rich, dark curtain, her great eyes searching the trees in the park below as if she sought there for the soul of her enemy. She did not know that she pulled hard at the curtain behind her with both hands; it could not have held out much longer, strong though it was. "No; you knew life too well not to know that you might be found out, but the truth was that you did not care. It was so little a thing to you that, when you saw that I knew the truth, you could go on just the same, quite unabashed. You could force yourself on me by playing on your poverty; you, who had tried to ruin my mother! Well, she is out of your reach, and perhaps you have shifted your foul suspicions on to me. Perhaps it is from me you hope to get the fortune that you mean to share. You drive me mad! I say things I don't want to say; you force me to lower myself, but----" She turned now and faced Edmund, who watched her, himself absolutely motionless. "Now that you have forced yourself on me again you shall answer me. Do you believe that I, Molly Dexter, have concealed or abetted in concealing or destroying any will in favour of Lady Rose Bright?" There is a moment when passion is astonishingly inventive. Molly had had no intention of saying anything of the kind, but the heat of passion had produced a stroke of policy that no colder moment could have produced. She was suddenly dumb with astonishment at her own words, and she dimly recognised that this represented a distinct crisis in her own mind. Passion and excitement had dissipated the last mists of self-deception. Edmund waited till there could be no faint suspicion of his trying to interrupt her, and then said from his heart, in a voice she had never heard from him before: "No, I swear to you I don't." Molly had been deeply flushed. At these words she turned very white, and her hands let go the curtains. She put them out before her and seemed to grope her way to a stiff, high-backed chair near to her. She sat down in it and clasped her hands to her forehead.