“You saw—who that was?”
Lady Ruth’s voice seemed to come from a greater distance. Wingrave turned and looked at her with calm curiosity. She was leaning back in the corner of the carriage, and she seemed somehow to have shrunk into an unusual insignificance. Her eyes alone were clearly visible through the semi-darkness—and the light which shone from their depths was the light of fear.
“Yes,” he answered slowly, “I believe that I recognized him. It was the young man who persists in some strange hallucination as to a certain Mademoiselle Violet.”
“It was no hallucination,” she answered. “You know that! I was Mademoiselle Violet!”
He nodded.
“It amazes me,” he said thoughtfully, “that you should have stooped to such folly. That my demise would have been a relief to you I can, of course, easily believe, but the means—they surely were not worthy of your ingenuity.”
“Don’t!” she cried sharply. “I must have been utterly, miserably mad!”
“Even the greatest of schemers have their wild moments,” he remarked consolingly. “This was one of yours. You paid me a very poor compliment, by the bye, to imagine that an insignificant creature like that—”
“Will you—leave off?” she moaned.
“I daresay,” he continued after a moment’s pause, “that you find him now quite an inconvenient person to deal with.”