She nodded.
“You remember, too, on that occasion, my saying what a splendid thing it was to feel quite easy in one’s mind, and that I had not always been able to by any means?”
“Yes.”
She was gravely attentive now. Her quick mind, not at ease itself, was rapidly piecing two and two together; wherefore his next remark caused her little if any surprise.
“That beastly thing young Stride sprung upon us the other day was an exact likeness of the man, only, of course, it exaggerated his villainous expression. He’s dead now; but what I suffered at that blackmailer’s hands—good God! Verna; when I think of it I could wish he might come to life so that I could kill him over again.”
Then a new experience came to Verna. This man, so strongly self-possessed, upon whom an easy dignity sat so well, had suddenly become a different being. His eyes glowed and his features were set. He seemed completely to have lost sight of her and her presence for the time being; to be “reconstituting” the tragedy of horror and revenge. This was a side of him—a tigerish side—of which she had never dreamed, but she did not shrink from it, not one atom. She put forth a hand into his, and the touch calmed him.
“Tell me, Alaric,” she said. “Why did you kill him? I dare say he deserved it. In fact, judging from that villainous-looking face he must have.”
He looked at her in some amazement. The cool, matter-of-fact tones in which she discussed what to most women would have come as a very disquieting shock, astonished him a good bit.
“Love,” he said in an uneven voice, placing the cool, shapely hands round his neck and against his face, “I place my life within those dear hands. I will tell you the whole thing.”
Then he told her how the dead man had systematically blackmailed him for some years past, acting on the knowledge of a former business secret, which if divulged would not merely have spelt ruin, but worse; a transaction into which he had been led by others, in the days of his comparative inexperience. Then he told her of the tragedy on the river bank in the Makanya forest; told her minutely, omitting no detail. She listened intently, breathlessly.