nt. "I have come here with two objects. To open your eyes to
your own situation, and to save your fortune--perhaps your life. Your
situation is this. Miss Bygrave has married you under a false character
and a false name. Can you rouse your memory? Can you call to mind the
disguised woman who threatened you in Vauxhall Walk? That woman--as
certainly as I stand here--is now your wife."

He looked at her in breathless silence, his lips falling apart, his
eyes fixed in vacant inquiry. The suddenness of the disclosure had
overreached its own end. It had stupefied him.

"My wife?" he repeated, and burst into an imbecile laugh.

"Your wife," reiterated Mrs. Lecount.

At the repetition of those two words the strain on his faculties
relaxed. A thought dawned on him for the first time. His eyes fixed on
her with a furtive alarm, and he drew back hastily. "Mad!" he said to
himself, with a sudden remembrance of what his friend Mr. Bygrave had
told him at Aldborough, sharpened by his own sense of the haggard change
that he saw in her face.

He spoke in a whisper, but Mrs. Lecount heard him. She was close at his
side again in an instant. For the first time, her self-possession failed
her, and she caught him angrily by the arm.

"Will you put my madness to the proof, sir?" she asked.

He shook off her hold; he began to gather courage again, in the intense
sincerity of his disbelief, courage to face the assertion which she
persisted in forcing on him.

"Yes," he answered. "What must I do?"

"Do what I told you," said Mrs. Lecount. "Ask the maid that question
about her mistress on the spot. And if she tells you the mark is there,
do one thing more. Take me up into your wife's room, and open her
wardrobe in my presence with your own hands."

"What do you want with her wardrobe?" he asked.

"You shall know when you open it."

"Very strange!" he said to himself, vacantly. "It's like a scene in a
novel--it's like nothing in real life." He went slowly into the house,
and Mrs. Lecount waited for him in the garden.

After an absence of a few minutes only he appeared again, on the top of
the flight of steps which led into the garden from the house. He held
by the iron rail with one hand, while with the other he beckoned to Mrs.
Lecount to join him on the steps.

"What does the maid say?" she asked, as she approached him. "Is the mark
there?"

He answered in a whisper, "Yes." What he had heard from the maid had
produced a mark