“Quite so. It was what we should have expected of him. Proceed.”
“And then—— But, oh, indeed, I cannot describe the scene that followed.”
“You needn’t. I can see it all. The fat was in the fire. There was a fiz, a blaze, a conflagration!”
“I cannot blame him for his anger then. The circumstances were so criminating. He demanded an explanation, but I could give him none without betraying your secret, which I was sworn to keep. It ended, as I told you, in his declaring that he did not love me, congratulating himself that he had never fallen into the deep degradation of loving me, and saying that he would leave the house, never to return while I should desecrate it with my presence.”
“Very melodramatic, and consequently very nonsensical, as all heroics are off the stage. And you believed him?”
“Yes; for I left the house that night.”
“And you still believe him, eh?”
“Yes; for I will never make known my existence to him.”
“What a baby you must be, Lilith, to believe all the ravings of a man maddened by jealousy. Why, child! you were no sooner gone than he ‘sought you sorrowing’ all over the country. A month later the body of a poor, unfortunate young woman who once belonged to our troupe, and was the wife of a man who sometimes acted under my name, was found in the woods in such a state of decomposition that it could not be recognized; but it was dressed in a suit of your clothes, which were readily enough identified by all your servants, so that the sapient coroner’s jury who sat upon the remains brought in a verdict that—‘Lilith Hereward came to her death by a blow on the back of her head from some blunt instrument held in the hand of some person unknown to the jury.’ When Hereward learned this verdict he fell like a slaughtered ox; and he knew no more of life for weeks——”
“Oh!” cried Lilith, involuntarily.