"Look! This is vitriol, the friend of the injured and the defenceless. I have carried it with me ever since I followed my husband to your house at Brook Green, and saw you making signals to him at midnight. I came once after that, and knocked at your door, intending then to avenge my wrongs; but you had gone away, and I was brutally treated by your police. But if I could not punish you I could punish him, for he belonged to me and not to you, and I had a right to make him suffer. I have made him suffer a little, it seems to me. Wait—I have more to say. Shall I make him suffer more? I have punished you through him; shall I punish him through you? For he would not like you to be maimed and disfigured through life: his sensitive soul would writhe, would it not? to know that you were suffering pain. Do you know what this magic water is? It stings and bites and eats away the flesh—it will blind you so that you can never see him again; and it will mar your white face so that he will never want to look at you. This is what I carry about for you."
Lettice watched the hand that held the bottle; but in truth she thought very little of the threat. Death had done for her already what this woman was talking about. Alan was past the love or vengeance of either of them, and all her pleasure in life was gone for ever.
"I thought I should find you here," Cora went on, "waiting at the prison for your lover! But I am waiting for him, too. I am his wife still. I have the right to wait for him, and you have not. And if you are there when he comes out, I shall stay my hand no longer. I warn you; so be prepared. But perhaps"—and she lifted the bottle, while her eyes flamed with dangerous light, and her voice sank to a sharp whisper—"perhaps it would be better to settle the question now!"
"The question," said Lettice, with almost unnatural calm of manner, "is settled for us. Alan has left his prison. Your husband is dead."
The woman gazed at her in stupefaction. Her hand fell to her side, and the light died out of her bold black eyes.
"Alan dead!' What is it you say? How do you know?"
"He had a fever in the jail to which you sent him. He has been at death's door for many weeks. Not an hour ago a warder came here and said that he was dead. Are you satisfied with your work?"
"My work?" said Cora, drawing back. "I have not killed him!"
"Yes," said Lettice, a surge of bitter anger rising in her heart, "yes, you have killed him, as surely as you tried to kill him with your pistol at Aix-les-Bains, and with his own dagger in Surrey Street. You are a murderess, and you know it well. But for you, Alan Walcott would still be living an honorable, happy life. You have stabbed him to the heart, and he is dead. That is the message I have to give you—to tell you that you have killed him, and that he is gone to a land where your unnatural hate can no longer follow him!"
Lettice stood over the cowering woman, strong and unpitying in her stern indignation, lifted out of all thought of herself by the intensity of her woe. Cora shrank away from her, slipping the bottle into her pocket, and even covertly making the sign of the cross as Lettice's last words fell upon her ear—words that sounded to her untutored imagination like a curse. But she could not be subdued for long. She stood silent for a few moments when Lettice ceased to speak, but finally a forced laugh issued from the lips that had grown pale beneath her paint.