"Then what?" He put his hand on her shoulder. "Poor old Dolly," he said softly. "But why did you say that about bringing mistresses down here?"
She looked up frankly—generously into his eyes. "Jealousy," she admitted.
He laughed lightly. It just caught the edge of his vanity to which she played. Then, bending down, he kissed her, and as Sally entered the room, she saw the kiss—to her, a kiss of Judas. In that instant, the intuition that it was she who was betrayed, shot upwards like a flame of fire, rushing the blood in a burning race to her temples.
CHAPTER IV
You may jeer at the instinct of a woman, plant the straight line of logic beside it and ridicule the comparison as you choose, but it is a sense, a subliminal sense, number it as you like, upon which she can rely as surely as on touch or scent or sight.
"One of those impulsive conjectures of yours," Traill had said to his sister in reply to her intuition of his relations with Sally. "You don't quite know what you're speaking about, and that gives you confidence. You're a woman." In the face of her accuracy he had said that. It is only retaliation a man has when a woman betrays the amazing abnormality of that sense which he can never hope to possess. He resorts to one weapon, the scientific reliability of evidence.
"Where's your evidence?" he asks, and having none, he smiles at her. But she knows; a knowledge that will sweep her into the fire of action, whilst he is methodically buckling on his armour of conviction with the straps of logical evidence.
It was this instinct, the sixth sense in Sally, that had cast her mind forward, flung it beyond herself into the future, where she saw the Tragedy that awaited her. From the moment she had seen that kiss, she had known that she had an enemy whose weapons were sure, whose wielding of them was quick and keen. From that moment, standing on the rise of so small, so insignificant an incident, she had seen ahead into the years and known what her end would be. With what evidence? None! With what reason? Little indeed of that. That they were standing with swords drawn when she had left the room and that when she returned the swords were sleeping in their scabbards and they were kissing to make friends—how much was there to be reasoned from that? Were not such incidents common to the relationship between brother and sister? Yet, beyond all that, Sally saw with a clearness of vision that penetrated every obvious deduction; saw away into the stretch of Time when his sister would have won him back to her side where she could have no place, no existence.
It might have been wrong, quite easily could have been false a thousand times, but it was knowledge to her, sure, fateful, undeniable knowledge; and from that day her instinct was keyed to find its proof. The cancerous disease of jealousy had dropped its first seed in the blood of her, and the vulturous growth began to spread its lean, clutching fingers about her heart.
"My sister's not hitting it off with her husband," Traill told her, that afternoon as they drove back to London.