"Kill him—why?" she asked in a weak voice, looking down at her trembling hands which lay clasped on the table before her.
"The letter—Fellowes' letter to you."
"I dropped it last night," she said, in a voice grown strangely impersonal and colourless. "I dropped it in Rudyard's room, I suppose."
She seemed not to have any idea of excluding the terrible facts, but to be speaking as it were to herself and of something not vital, though her whole person was transformed into an agony which congealed the lifeblood.
Her voice sounded tuneless and ragged. "He read it—Rudyard read a letter which was not addressed to him! He read a letter addressed to me—he read my letter.... It gave me no chance."
"No chance—?"
A bitter indignation was added to the cheerless discord of her tones. "Yes, I had a chance, a last chance—if he had not read the letter. But now, there is no chance.... You read it, too. You read the letter which was addressed to me. No matter what it was—my letter, you read it."
"Rudyard said to me in his terrible agitation, 'Read that letter, and then tell me what you think of the man who wrote it.' ... I thought it was the letter I wrote to you, the letter I posted to you last night. I thought it was my letter to you."
Her eyes had a sudden absent look. It was as though she were speaking in a trance. "I answered that letter—your letter. I answered it this morning. Here is the answer ... here." She laid a letter on the table before him, then drew it back again into her lap. "Now it does not matter. But it gives me no chance...."
There was a world of despair and remorse in her voice. Her face was wan and strained. "No chance, no chance," she whispered.