"You twist my words to give them a false meaning!" she exclaimed. "You are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong light. I can explain--why, the whole thing is so simple when you understand." "Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge--I'm all for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every standpoint." So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the vanished Mr. Murrill--how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what followed--all of it she told him, withholding nothing. He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint, depended. "Well," he said, "if that's the way this thing happened and if you've told your husband about it"--he dragged his words just a trifle--"why should you be so worried, even if these pictures should reach him?" Her look told him the shot had struck home. Inwardly he rejoiced, knowing, before she answered, what her answer would be. "But I didn't tell him," she confessed, stricken with a new cause for concern. "I--I forgot to tell him." "Oh, you forgot to tell him?" he repeated. Now suddenly he became a cross-examiner, snapping his questions at her, catching her up sharply in her replies. "And you say you never saw this Mr. Murrill--as you call him--before in all your life?" "No." "And you've never seen the mysterious stranger since?" "There was nothing mysterious about him, I tell you. He was merely interesting." "Anyhow, you've never seen him since?" "No." "Nor had any word from him other than that telephone talk you say you had with him?" "No." "Did you ever make any inquiries with a view to finding out whether there was such a person as this Mrs. Beeman Watrous?" "No; why should I?" "That's a question for you to decide. Did you think to look in the papers to see whether General Dunlap had really been taken ill on a motor trip?" "No." "Yet he's a well-known person. Surely you expected the papers would mention his illness?" "It never occurred to me to look. I tell you there was nothing wrong about it. Why do you try to trip me up so?"