Then in a flash he understood, for his keen faculties were on edge, concentrated to one point, and as sensitive as magnets. He recalled his high estimate of this girl during the weeks of their intimacy, and the instinctive doubts that had assailed him in his rooms on the night of the murder. And as he realised the fierce battle that was raging in that passionate but disciplined soul, he knew that she loved him, and he scorned himself for attributing her former tentative advances to calculation or that compound of nerves and imagination which so many women call love. She had given him her heart, and it had betrayed her. But while the knowledge gave him an unexpected thrill, he ruthlessly determined to try and to test her to the utmost.
He stood up and walked about the room for a moment, and then halted directly in front of her.
"Do you know anything?" he asked abruptly.
"About what? Do you think I suspect you?"
"No, I don't. I mean Mrs. Balfame."
"I told you we all believe she did it. We can't help ourselves."
"I don't understand the attitude of any of you women who were her friends, her intimates. You—they, rather—have let her lead this community for years, believed her to be little short of perfection. And now with one accord they accept her guilt as a matter of course."
"I think they came to with a sort of shock and realised they never had understood her at all. She had them hypnotised. I think she's one of those Occidentals with terrible latent powers for whom new laws will have to be made when they awake to consciousness of them and begin to develop them with the power and skill of the Orientals—"
"Beg pardon, but let's keep to the present."
"Well, I mean it rather excites them to be able to believe, not so much that she did it, as that she was capable of it, that while uniformly sweet and serene, she had those terrible secreted depths. She reminds one of Lucrezia Borgia, or Catherine de Medici—"