d your own countrymen, if you
please. The ten thousand pounds was a legacy left to my excellent wife
by the late Mr. Fairlie. Place the affair on those grounds, and I will
discuss it if you like. To a man of my sentiments, however, the
subject is deplorably sordid. I prefer to pass it over. I invite you
to resume the discussion of your terms. What do you demand?"

"In the first place, I demand a full confession of the conspiracy,
written and signed in my presence by yourself."

He raised his finger again. "One!" he said, checking me off with the
steady attention of a practical man.

"In the second place, I demand a plain proof, which does not depend on
your personal asseveration, of the date at which my wife left
Blackwater Park and travelled to London."

"So! so! you can lay your finger, I see, on the weak place," he
remarked composedly. "Any more?"

"At present, no more."

"Good! you have mentioned your terms, now listen to mine. The
responsibility to myself of admitting what you are pleased to call the
'conspiracy' is less, perhaps, upon the whole, than the responsibility
of laying you dead on that hearthrug. Let us say that I meet your
proposal--on my own conditions. The statement you demand of me shall
be written, and the plain proof shall be produced. You call a letter
from my late lamented friend informing me of the day and hour of his
wife's arrival in London, written, signed, and dated by himself, a
proof, I suppose? I can give you this. I can also send you to the man
of whom I hired the carriage to fetch my visitor from the railway, on
the day when she arrived--his order-book may help you to your date,
even if his coachman who drove me proves to be of no use. These things
I can do, and will do, on conditions. I recite them. First condition!
Madame Fosco and I leave this house when and how we please, without
interference of any kind on your part. Second condition! You wait
here, in company with me, to see my agent, who is coming at seven
o'clock in the morning to regulate my affairs. You give my agent a
written order to the man who has got your sealed letter to resign his
possession of it. You wait here till my agent places that letter
unopened in my hands, and you then allow me one clear half-hour to
leave the house--after which you resume your own freedom of action and
go where you please. Third condition! You give me the satisfaction of
a gentleman for your intrusion into my privat