'Basil; tell me the square truth, honest Injun! What had I been up to
that night?'

CHAPTER X.--Not Too Mad, But Just Mad Enough.

IT was out! She knew!

What was I to say, how evade her impulsive cross-examinations. I fell
back upon evasions.

'Why do I want to know?' she echoed, 'because I choose to! I hated him.
He took a walk, I took a walk, and I had taken something before I took a
walk. If we met, I was bound to have words with him. Basil, did I dream
it, or read it long ago in some old penny dreadful of the past?'

Philippa occasionally broke into blank verse like this, but not often.

'Dearest, it must have been a dream,'

I said, catching at this hope of soothing her.

'No, no!' she screamed; 'no--no dream. Not any more, thank you! I can
see myself standing now over that crushed white mass! Basil, I could
never bear him in that hat, and I must have gone for him!'

I consoled Philippa as well as I could, but she kept screaming.

'_How_ did I kill him?'

'Goodness only knows, Philippa,' I replied; 'but you had a key in your
hand--a door-key.'

'Ah, that fatal latch-key!' she said, 'the cause of our final quarrel.
Where is it? What have you done with it?' she shouted.

'I threw it away,' I replied. This was true, but I could not think of
anything better to say.

'You threw it away! Didn't you know it would become a _piece
justificatif?_' said my poor Philippa, who had not read Gaboriau to no
purpose.

I passed the night wrestling in argument with Philippa. She reproached
me for having returned from Spain, 'which was quite safe, you know--it
is the place city men go to when they bust up,' she remarked in her
peculiarly idiomatic style. She reproved me for not having told her all
about it before, in which case she would never have consented to return
to England.

'They will try me--they will hang me!' she repeated.

'Not a bit,' I answered. 'I can prove that you were quite out of your
senses when you did for him.'

'_You_ prove it!' she sneered; 'a pretty lawyer _you_ are. Why, they
won't take a husband's evidence for or against a wife in a criminal
case. This comes of your insisting on marrying me.'

'But I doubt if we _are_ married, Philippa, dear, as we never could
remember whether you were wedded under your maiden name or as Philippa
Errand. Besides----' I was going to say that William, the White Groom
(late the Sphynx), could show to her having been (as he once expressed
it) as