‘I have sent for you to tell you that I have been guilty of a fraud upon you, and upon this lady,’ answered John Treverton, in a steady voice. He was going on with his self-denunciation, when the door opened, and Trimmer announced Mr. Edward Clare. The young man came into the room quickly, looking round him with a swift, viperish glance. He was surprised to see Laura, still more surprised at the presence of Tom Sampson. He had expected to find his father and Treverton alone. John Treverton looked at the intruder with undisguised irritation. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ he said; ‘but perhaps when I tell you that your father and Mr. Sampson are here to discuss a business of some importance to me--and to them as my wife’s trustees--you’ll be kind enough to amuse yourself in the drawing-room until we’ve finished our conversation.’ ‘I have come to speak to Mrs. Treverton. I have something to say to her which she ought to hear--which she must hear--and that without an hour’s delay,’ said Edward. ‘Accident has made me acquainted with a secret which concerns her and her welfare--and I am here to communicate it to her, and--in the first instance--to her alone. It will be for her to act upon that knowledge--for me to defer to her.’ ‘If your secret concerns me, it must concern my husband also,’ said Laura, rising and taking her stand beside John Treverton. ‘Whatever touches my happiness must involve his. You can speak out, Edward. Possibly your fancied secret is no secret.’ ‘What do you mean?’ stammered Edward, startled by her calm look and resolute tone. ‘Have you come to tell me that my husband, John Treverton, was for a short period of his life known by the name of Chicot?’ ‘Yes, that, and much else,’ answered Edward, deeply mortified at finding himself forestalled. ‘You wish to tell me, perhaps, that he has been suspected of murder.’ ‘So strongly suspected, and upon such evidence, that it will need all your wifely trustfulness to believe him innocent,’ retorted Edward, with a malignant sneer. ‘Yet I do believe in his innocence--I am as certain of it as I am that I myself am no murderess--and if the evidence against him were doubly strong, my trust in him would not fail,’ said Laura, facing the accuser proudly. ‘And now, Mr. Clare, since you find that your secret is everybody’s secret, and that my wife knows all you can tell her about me----’ ‘Your wife,’ sneered Edward. ‘Yes, it is as well to call her by that name.’ ‘She is my wife--bound to me as securely as the law and the church can bind her.’ ‘You had another wife living when you married her--unless you have been remarried since your first wife’s death----’ ‘We have been so married. My wife was never mine, save in name, until I was a free man,--free to claim her before God and the world.’