“Favour me with your attention for one moment,” she said, in her clear icily-suppressed tones. “I have to thank you, Sir Percival, for your hospitality, and to decline taking advantage of it any longer. I remain in no house in which ladies are treated as your wife and Miss Halcombe have been treated here today!”

Sir Percival drew back a step, and stared at her in dead silence. The declaration he had just heard⁠—a declaration which he well knew, as I well knew, Madame Fosco would not have ventured to make without her husband’s permission⁠—seemed to petrify him with surprise. The Count stood by, and looked at his wife with the most enthusiastic admiration.