Robert, looking up suddenly, plainly expressed in his face the surprise he felt at these words.
"I should be very poorly able to meet the contingencies of my professional experience," said Dr. Mosgrave, "if I could not perceive where confidence ends and reservation begins. You have only told me half this lady's story, Mr. Audley. You must tell me more before I can offer you any advice. What has become of the first husband?"
He asked this question in a decisive tone, as if he knew it to be the key-stone of an arch.
"I have already told you, Dr. Mosgrave, that I do not know."
"Yes," answered the physician, "but your face has told me what you have withheld from me; it has told me that you suspect."
Robert Audley was silent.
"If I am to be of use to you, you must trust me, Mr. Audley," said the physician. "The first husband disappeared--how and when? I want to know the history of his disappearance."
Robert paused for some time before he replied to this speech; but, by and by, he lifted his head, which had been bent in an attitude of earnest thought, and addressed the physician.
"I will trust you, Dr. Mosgrave," he said. "I will confide entirely in your honor and goodness. I do not ask you to do any wrong to society; but I ask you to save our stainless name from degradation and shame, if you can do so conscientiously."
He told the story of George's disappearance, and of his own doubts and fears, Heaven knows how reluctantly.
Dr. Mosgrave listened as quietly as he had listened before. Robert concluded with an earnest appeal to the physician's best feelings. He implored him to spare the generous old man whose fatal confidence in a wicked woman had brought much misery upon his declining years.
It was impossible to draw any conclusion, either favorable or otherwise, from Dr. Mosgrave's attentive face. He rose, when Robert had finished speaking, and looked at his watch once more.
"I can only spare you twenty minutes," he said. "I will see the lady, if you please. You say her mother died in a madhouse?"
"She did. Will you see Lady Audley alone?"
"Yes, alone, if you please."
Robert rung for my lady's maid, and under convoy of that smart young damsel the physician found his way to the octagon antechamber, and the fairy boudoir with which it communicated.
Ten minutes afterward, he returned to the library, in which Robert sat waiting for him.
"I have talked to the lady," he said, quietly, "and we understand each other very well. There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a lifetime. It would be a dementia in its worst phase, perhaps; acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under extreme mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!"