"Rudyard did not kill him?" she asked, slowly and cheerlessly, after a moment, as though repeating a lesson. "Why?"
"I stopped him. I prevented him."
"You prevented him—why?" Her eyes had a look of unutterable confusion and trouble. "Why did you prevent it—you?"
"That would have hurt you—the scandal, the grimy press, the world."
Her voice was tuneless, and yet it had a strange, piteous poignancy. "It would have hurt me—yes. Why did you not want to hurt me?"
He did not answer. His hands had gone into his pockets, as though to steady their wild nervousness, and one had grasped the little weapon of steel which Rudyard had given him. It produced some strange, malignant effect on his mind. Everything seemed to stop in him, and he was suddenly possessed by a spirit which carried him into that same region where Rudyard had been. It was the region of the abnormal. In it one moves in a dream, majestically unresponsive to all outward things, numb, unconcerned, disregarding all except one's own agony, which seems to neutralize the universe and reduce all life's problems to one formula of solution.
"What did you say to him that stopped him?" she asked in a whisper of awed and dreadful interest, as, after an earthquake, a survivor would speak in the stillness of dead and unburied millions.
"I said the one thing to say," he answered after a moment, involuntarily laying the pistol on the table before him—doing it, as it were, without conscious knowledge.
It fascinated Jasmine, the ugly, deadly little vehicle of oblivion. Her eyes fastened on it, and for an instant stared at it transfixed; then she recovered herself and spoke again.
"What was the one thing to say?" she whispered.