'Mean!' said Statham. 'There is one portion of it, at all events, which is sufficiently intelligible. "I know my exact position now;" she has learned what we have been so long endeavouring to hide from her! She knows the exact relation in which she stood with Mr. Calverley.' 'Merciful powers, do you think so?' cried Martin. 'What other meaning could that phrase convey?' said Humphrey Statham. 'I myself have no doubt of it, and I think Madame Du Tertre is of my opinion; are you not, madame?' 'I am, indeed,' said Pauline. 'But where can Alice have learned the secret?' said Martin; 'who can have told it to her?' 'I have no doubt on that point either,' said Pauline; 'it must have been told to her by Mr. Wetter.' 'Wetter!' cried Martin and Humphrey both at the same time. 'Mr. Henrich Wetter,' repeated Pauline. 'It was he who beguiled me into the City upon a false pretence, and on my return home I learned from the servant that he had been at the house during my absence, and had a long interview with her mistress. Then I recognised at once that I had been gotten out of the way for this very purpose.' 'Your suspicions of this man seem to have been just,' said Martin, turning to Humphrey Statham, and speaking slowly, 'though they did not point in that direction.' 'Yes, as I told you before, I knew him to be a bad fellow, and a particularly undesirable acquaintance for Mrs. Claxton,' said Statham. 'But I confess, Madame Du Tertre, that I do not yet see why you should fix upon Mr. Wetter as the guilty person in the present instance, independently, that is to say, of the fact that he was with Mrs. Claxton in the interval between your leaving home and your return, during which she seems to have acquired this information. I should not have thought that Wetter could have known anything about the Calverley and Claxton mystery.' 'He knows everything that he wants to know,' cried Pauline with energy; 'He is a fiend, a clever merciless fiend. If it were his interest--and it was, as I happen to know--to make himself acquainted with Alice's history, he would learn it at whatever cost of money, patience, and trouble! It is he that has done this and no one else, be sure of that.' 'We must allow then, I suppose,' said Humphrey Statham, referring to the paper which he still held in his hand, 'that the discovery which Mrs. Claxton claims to have made is that of her relations with Mr. Calverley, and it seems likely that she gained the information from Mr. Wetter, who gave it her for his own purpose. I take only a subordinate part in the matter, Martin, as your friend, but it strikes me that it is for you, as Alice's guardian, to ask Madame Du Tertre, who has evidently a bad opinion--worse than mine almost--of Mr. Wetter, why, having that opinion, she introduced this man to Alice, and suffered him to become intimate at Pollington-terrace.'