Breathlessly she watched. He smiled a little to himself, smelt the liquid, and held it once more towards the light, as if to judge with his narrowed eyes of the quantity required. Then, with a noiseless foot and watchful eye, he moved towards the bed, still holding the tumbler in his hand. He looked down for a moment at the pale and wrinkled face upon the pillow; then he spoke in a peculiarly smooth and ingratiating tone of voice.
"Aunt Margaret," he said, "I have brought you something to make you sleep."
He had placed the glass to her lips, when a movement in the next room made him start and lift his eyes. In another moment his wife's hands were on his arm, and her eyes were blazing into his own. The liquor in the glass was spilt upon the bed. Hugo turned deadly pale.
"What do you mean? What do you want?" he said, with a look of mingled rage and terror. "What are you doing here?"
"I have come to save her—from you." She was not afraid, now that the words were said, now that she had seen the guilty look upon his face. She confronted him steadily; she placed herself between him and the bed. Hugo uttered a low but emphatic malediction on her "meddlesome folly."
"Why are you not in your room?" he said. "I locked you in."
"I was not there. Thank God that I was not."
"And why should you thank God?" said Hugo, who stood looking at her with an ugly expression of baffled cunning on his face. "I was doing no harm. I was giving her a sleeping-draught."
"Would she ever have waked?" asked Kitty, in a whisper.
She looked into her husband's eyes as she spoke, and she knew from that moment that the accusation was based on no idle fancy of her own. In heart, at least, he was a murderer.