Olivia did not answer immediately. She was thinking hard. The possibility that her husband had committed suicide, or that any one could suppose that he had committed suicide, had never entered her head. She perceived, however, that it was a supposition worth encouraging. At the same time, she must not seem eager to encourage it.
"But they told me that he'd been murdered," she said.
"We cannot exclude any possibility from a matter like this, and the possibility of suicide must be taken into account," said Mr. Flexen quickly. "You don't know of any domestic trouble which might have induced Lord Loudwater to make an end of himself?"
"No, I don't know of one," said Olivia firmly. "But, of course, he was sometimes quite mad."
"Mad?" said Mr. Flexen.
"Yes, quite. I told him so last night—just before dinner. He was quite mad. He said that I had kissed a friend of ours—at least he was a friend of both of us till he quarrelled with my husband some weeks ago—in the East wood. He raged about it, and declared he was going to start a divorce action. But I didn't take much notice of it. He was always falling into dreadful rages. There was one at breakfast about my cat and another at lunch about the wine. He fancied it was corked."
Olivia had perceived clearly that since Elizabeth Twitcher had been a witness of her husband's outburst about Grey, it would be merely foolish not to be frank about it.
"But the last matter was very much more serious than the matter of the cat or the wine," said Mr. Flexen. "You don't think that your husband brooded on it for the rest of the evening and worked himself up into a dangerous frame of mind?"
Olivia hesitated. She was quite sure that her husband had done nothing of the kind, for if he had worked himself up into a dangerous frame of mind he would assuredly have made some effort to get at her and give some violent expression to it. But she said:
"That I can't say. I wish I'd gone down to dinner—now. But I was too much annoyed. I dined in my boudoir. I'd had quite enough unpleasantness for one day. Perhaps one of the servants could tell you. They may have noticed something unusual in him—perhaps that he was brooding."