He shrugged his shoulders with increasing weariness, an immense desire to have the subject ended and put away with forgotten things.
"I am glad, then. Have it as you like."
But she resumed with a pertinacity which his irritated nerves found malignant.
"If it was that," she said ambiguously, "you had better have held your tongue. You had only to gain—— Ah, why did you do it? What was the good?"
He made another gesture of lassitude; then, rousing himself, he remarked:
"It was a calculation, then, a piece of simple arithmetic. If it gives her a little peace a little longer, why should three persons suffer—be sacrificed—when two might serve?"
"Oh, him!" cried the girl scornfully; "he can't suffer—he hasn't a heart!"
Rainham looked up at her at last. His fingers ceased playing with his ring.
"Oh, let me count for a little," he murmured, with a little, ghastly laugh.
The girl's eyes looked full into his, and in a moment they shone out of her face, which was suffused with a rosy flush that made her almost beautiful, with the illumination of some transcendent idea.