"Oh! I'm going to be perfectly honest with you," I returned. "Can't you drop that burlesque of the legal manner and be equally honest with me?"
"Simply dunno what you're driving at," he said.
"Very well, then, answer the question you shirked just now," I retorted. "Why did your mother rush to tell you that I hadn't slept in the house last night?"
"The mater's in an awful state of nerves," he said.
Incidentally I had to admit to myself that I had not made sufficient allowance for that indubitable fact, but I chose to disregard it at the moment. I wanted to be sure of the treachery of Grace Tattersall.
"You asked me not to beat about the bush, a minute ago," I said, "and now you're trying to dodge all my questions with the most futile and palpable evasions."
"For instance?" he replied calmly, with a cunning that nearly trapped me. For when I tried to recall, as I thought I could, a specific and convincing instance of his evasion, I realised that to cite a case would only draw us into an irrelevant bickering over side issues.
"Your last three or four answers were all obvious equivocations," I said, and raising my voice I went straight on over his attempt to expostulate by adding, "And if Mrs. Jervaise's state of nerves is an excuse for her confiding in _you_, it isn't, in my opinion, any excuse for her confiding in Miss Tattersall and Nora Bailey and Hughes, and setting them on to--ostracise me."
"Oh! come," Jervaise protested, a little taken aback. I had put him in a quandary, now. He had to choose between an imputation on his mother's good taste, savoir faire, breeding--and an admission of the rather shameful source of the present accusation against me.
"As a matter of fact, it's absolutely clear to me that Grace Tattersall is at the bottom of all this," I continued, to get this point settled. "I'm perfectly sure your mother would not have treated me as she did unless her mind had been perverted in some way."
"But why should she--Miss Tattersall--I mean she seemed rather keen on you..."
"I can explain that," I interrupted him. "She wanted to gossip with me about the whole affair this morning, and she made admissions that I suppose she was subsequently ashamed of. And after that she discovered by an accident that I had met Banks, and jumped to the totally false conclusion that I had been drawing her out for my own disreputable purposes."