Then Ravengar approached Hugo, and, Hugo rising to meet him, their faces almost touched in the middle of the great room.
'You called me a cur,' he said. 'Yet perhaps I am not such a cur after all. You have beaten me. You mean to finish me; I can see it in your face. Well, you will regret it more than I shall. Do you know I have often wished to die? You are right in saying that there is no reason why I should live. I am only a curse to the world. But you are wrong to scorn me when you kill me. You ought to pity me. Did I choose my temperament, my individuality? As I am, so I was born, and from his character no man can escape.'
And he sat down, and Hugo sat down.
'When is it to be?' Ravengar questioned.
'In a few minutes,' said Hugo impassively, feeding his mortal resentment on the memory of those hours when he himself had waited for death in the vault.
'Then I shall have time to ask you how you came to know that Camilla Payne, or rather Camilla Tudor, is alive.'
'She is not alive,' Hugo explained. 'The suggestion contained in my decoy letter was a pure invention in order to entice you. As you tempted me into the vault, so I tempted you here on your way to the vault.'
'But she is alive all the same!' Ravengar persisted. 'It is the fact that she is not dead that makes me less unwilling to die, for a word from her might send me to a death more shameful than the one you have so kindly arranged for me.'
Hugo in that instant admired Ravengar, and he replied quite gently:
'You are mistaken. Where can you have got the idea that she is not dead? She is dead. I myself—I myself screwed her up in her coffin.'