"Are you afraid of being robbed?" she asked. "One would imagine that your room there held a secret."
She was watching him, and she told herself the shot had gone to its mark.
He followed her finger with his eyes, and kept his face turned away from her.
"Yes, that is so," he answered quietly. "That little room holds its secret and its ghost for me. Would to God," he cried, with a sudden passion trembling in his tones, "that I had never seen it—that I had never come here!"
Her heart beat fast. Could it be that he was going to confess to her? Then he turned suddenly round, and in the twilight his white face and dark luminous eyes seemed to her like mute emblems of an anguish which moved her woman's heart to pity. There was none of the cowardice of guilt there, nothing of the criminal in the deep melancholy which seemed to have set its mark upon his whole being. And yet he must be very guilty—very much a criminal.
Her eyes strayed from his face back to the window again. There was no light anywhere in the house. It had a cold desolate look which chilled her.
"Is that the room where you sit?" she asked, pointing to it.
"Yes. There is no other furnished, except my housekeeper's, and she is away now."
"Away! Then who is with you in the house?"
"At present, no one," he answered. "She was taken ill, and went home this morning. She is generally ill."