“You drove her to it, you cursed liar! I could have made her happy. It was me she loved. Yes, take that in, more than she loved Malcolm. Nothing stood between us but your lies. You determined and plotted it, when the weapon was put into your hands by our folly. You’ve killed her, and you are glad that she is dead.”
She did not pause for his revilement. Her mind was fixed in its exultation. “No; it was Malcolm she loved more dearly. She chose between you. She knew herself too weak to stay. He came for her and she has gone to him. He has forgiven her. The husband and the wife are together.”
Bevis leaned his head against the bedpost and closed his eyes. The idle folly of his fury dropped from him. He felt only a sick loathing and exhaustion. “Leave me,” he muttered. “You’ll not grudge me what I have left. Leave me with her. Never let me see your face again.”
Almost as if with a glad docility, drawing, in the spring sunlight, her brilliant robe about her, Miss Latimer rose, and her face kept the glitter of its supernatural triumph. She obeyed as if recognizing to the full his claim upon the distenanted form lying there. For a moment only she paused beside the bed and looked down at the dead woman, and he seemed then, dimly, and now indifferently, to see on her lips the pitiless smile of a priest above a sacrificial victim.
Then the rustle of her robe passed round the room. The door closed softly behind her, and he was alone with all that was left him of Tony.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A