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"Her name is or was Madelina Belleville. Do you tell me that you have never had any dealings whatever with her?" Dacre laughed again fiercely, scoffingly. "You don't imagine that I would marry a woman of that sort, do you?" he said. "That is no answer to my question," Monck said firmly. "Confound you!" Dacre blazed into open wrath. "Who the devil are you to enquire into my private affairs?
Upon the shady banks of the Madelina there grows a climbing plant which the botanists call Aristolochia, the flowers of which are four feet in circumference, and children amuse themselves with covering their heads with them as hats.
He did not speak for a moment; then curtly, noncommittally, "What do you mean?" he said. "I mean," very steadily Bernard made reply, "that the scoundrel Dacre, who married Madelina Belleville and then deserted her, left her to go to the dogs, and your brother-officer who was killed in the mountains on his honeymoon, were one and the same man. And you knew it." "Well?"
The man I wrote to you about just before poor Madelina Belleville died in prison. Her husband's name was Dacre. He was in the Army too, and she thought he was in India. But it's not a very uncommon name." Bernard spoke thoughtfully. "You said he was no relation." "I said to the best of my belief he was not." Everard turned suddenly and sat down.
The words seemed to come from closed lips. There was something terrible in the titter quietness of its utterance. Bernard searched his face as a man might search the walls of an apparently impregnable fortress for some vulnerable spot. "Ah, I see," he said, after a moment. "You must have believed Madelina to be still alive when Dacre married. What was the date of his marriage?"
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