He handed her one of the printed bills, which she read with a steady and attentive face.

‘This is more than I knew of him,’ she said, giving it back.

Clennam’s looks expressed his heavy disappointment, perhaps his incredulity; for she added in the same unsympathetic tone: ‘You don’t believe it. Still, it is so. As to personal communication: it seems that there was personal communication between him and your mother. And yet you say you believe her declaration that she knows no more of him!’

A sufficiently expressive hint of suspicion was conveyed in these words, and in the smile by which they were accompanied, to bring the blood into Clennam’s cheeks.

‘Come, sir,’ she said, with a cruel pleasure in repeating the stab, ‘I will be as open with you as you can desire. I will confess that if I cared for my credit (which I do not), or had a good name to preserve (which I have not, for I am utterly indifferent to its being considered good or bad), I should regard myself as heavily compromised by having had anything to do with this fellow. Yet he never passed in at my door—never sat in colloquy with me until midnight.’

She took her revenge for her old grudge in thus turning his subject against him. Hers was not the nature to spare him, and she had no compunction.

‘That he is a low, mercenary wretch; that I first saw him prowling about Italy (where I was, not long ago), and that I hired him there, as the suitable instrument of a purpose I happened to have; I have no objection to tell you. In short, it was worth my while, for my own pleasure—the gratification of a strong feeling—to pay a spy who would fetch and carry for money. I paid this creature. And I dare say that if I had wanted to make such a bargain, and if I could have paid him enough, and if he could have done it in the dark, free from all risk, he would have taken any life with as little scruple as he took my money. That, at least, is my opinion of him; and I see it is not very far removed from yours. Your mother’s opinion of him, I am to assume (following your example of assuming this and that), was vastly different.’

‘My mother, let me remind you,’ said Clennam, ‘was first brought into communication with him in the unlucky course of business.’

‘It appears to have been an unlucky course of business that last brought her into communication with him,’ returned Miss Wade; ‘and business hours on that occasion were late.’

‘You imply,’ said Arthur, smarting under these cool-handed thrusts, of which he had deeply felt the force already, ‘that there was something—’

‘Mr Clennam,’ she composedly interrupted, ‘recollect that I do not speak by implication about the man. He is, I say again without disguise, a low mercenary wretch. I suppose such a creature goes where there is occasion for him. If I had not had occasion for him, you would not have seen him and me together.’

Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case before him, of which there was a half- hidden shadow in his own breast, Clennam was silent.

‘I have spoken of him as still living,’ she added, ‘but he may have been put out of the way for anything I know. For anything I care, also. I have no further occasion for him.’

With a heavy sigh and a despondent air, Arthur Clennam slowly rose.

She did not rise also, but said, having looked at him in the meanwhile with a fixed look of suspicion, and lips angrily compressed:

‘He was the chosen associate of your dear friend, Mr Gowan, was he not? Why don’t you ask your dear friend to help you?’