Wade sank her eyes.
"I hoped," she made answer, "to find out something. I had only in
view to serve you."
"You have deluded yourself, and been deluded, in the strangest way.
Now, I will give you one reason (a very odd, but a very satisfactory
one) why it is impossible to believe Glazzard guilty of such
baseness--setting aside the obvious fact that he had no motive. He
goes in for modelling in clay, and for some time he has been busy on
a very fine head. What head do you think?--That of Judas
Iscariot."
He laughed.
"Now, a man guilty of abominable treachery would not choose for an
artistic subject the image of an arch-traitor."
Mrs. Wade smiled strangely as she listened to his scornful
demonstration.
"You have given me," she said, "a most important piece of evidence
in support of Northway's story."
Denzil was ill at ease. He could not dismiss this lady with
contempt. Impossible that he should not have learnt by this time the
meaning of her perpetual assiduity on his behalf; the old
friendliness (never very warm) had changed to a compassion which
troubled him. Her image revived such painful memories that he would
have welcomed any event which put her finally at a distance from him
The Polterham scandal, though not yet dead, had never come to his
ears; had he known it, he could scarcely have felt more constrained
in her society.
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