He nodded towards the table where it lay, then went forward and picked it up, his face hardening as he did so.
Like a pendulum her mood swung back. By accident he had said the one thing which could have moved her, changed her at the moment. The savage side of him appealed to her. What he lacked in brilliance and the lighter gifts of raillery and eloquence and mental give-and-take, he had balanced by his natural forces—from the power-house, as she had called it long ago. Pity, solicitude, the forced smile, magnanimity, she did not want in this black mood. They would have made her cruelly audacious, and her temper would have known no license; but now, suddenly, she had a vision of him as he stamped down the staircase, his coat off, laying the sjambok on the shoulders of the man who had injured her so, who hated her so, and had done so over all the years. It appealed to her.
In her heart of hearts she was sure he had done it directly or indirectly for her sake; and that was infinitely more to her than that he should stoop from the heights to pick her up. He was what he was because Heaven had made him so; and she was what she was because Heaven had forgotten to make her otherwise; and he could not know or understand how she came to do things that he would not do. But she could know and understand why his hand fell on Krool like that of Cain on Abel. She softened, changed at once.
"Yes, I remember," she said. "I've been upset. Krool was insolent, and I ordered him to go. He would not."
"I've been a fool to keep him all these years. I didn't know what he was—a traitor, the slimmest of the slim, a real Hottentot-Boer. I was pigheaded about him, because he seemed to care so much about me. That counts for much with the most of us."
"Alice Tynemouth saw a policeman help him into a cab in Piccadilly and take him away. Will there be trouble?"
A grim look crossed his face. "I think not," he responded. "There are reasons. He has been stealing information for years, and sending it to Kruger, he and—"
He stopped short, and into his face came a look of sullen reticence.
"Yes, he and—and some one else? Who else?" Her face was white. She had a sudden intuition.
He met her eyes. "Adrian Fellowes—what Fellowes knew, Krool knew, and one way or another, by one means or another, Fellowes knew a great deal."