“I heard it,” said Mr. Rigget obstinately.
“I suggest,” said Cousin Alexander, “that you thought you heard it.”
“No, I heard it.”
“Is it possible, Mr. Rigget, that you may have been mistaken in what you heard?”
There was a blessed quality of moral absolution in the word “mistaken,” and Mr. Rigget fell for it.
“Perhaps,” he said, and Cousin Alexander sighed.
“Do you like the accused?—or rather, is it true that you bear no grudge against him?”
“I hardly know him.”
“Yet you knew the intimate affairs of his life. You knew he had been ‘carrying on’ with Mrs. Brande.”
“I had heard it.”
“Do you think now that you may have been mistaken?”
“I had heard it.”
“May it have been untrue?”
“It may.”
Cousin Alexander began to enjoy himself. His elation, which had been slowly growing ever sin
