“I was just going out to the Witte society concert,” said Mrs. Vansittart. “I thought the open air and the wood would be pleasant this evening. Shall we go or shall we remain?” She stood with her hand on the bell looking at him.
“Let us remain here,” he answered.
She rang the bell and countermanded the carriage. Then she sat slowly down, moving as under a sort of oppression, as if she foresaw what the next few minutes contained, and felt herself on the threshold of one of the surprises that Fate springs upon us at odd times, tearing aside the veils behind which human hearts have slept through many years. For indifference is not the death, but only the sleep of the heart.
“You have just arrived?”
“No; I have been here a week.”
“At The Hague?”
“No,” answered Cornish, with a grave smile; “at a little inn in Scheveningen, where no questions are asked.”
Mrs. Vansittart nodded her head slowly. “Then, mon ami,” she said, “the time has come for plain speaking?”
“I suppose so.”
“It is always the woman who wants to get to the plain speaking,” she said, with a smile, “and who speaks the plainest when one gets there. You men are afraid of so many words; you think them, but you dare not make use of them. And how are women to know that you are thinking them?” She spoke with a sort of tolerant bitterness, as if all these questions no longer interested her personally. She sat forward, with one hand on the arm of her chair. “Come,” she said, with a little laugh that shook and trembled on the brink of a whole sea of unshed tears, “I will speak the first word. When my husband died, my heart broke—and it was Otto von Holzen who killed him.” Her eyes flashed suddenly, and she threw herself back in the chair. Her hands were trembling.