“Oh, go away, you horrid, mean thing. I can’t bear you. Don’t talk to me. Don’t you dare touch me.”
“As bad as all that? Dear, dear! You’re taking him harder than you took most of us. You like them good, is that it? Gives you something to do making them over.”
“You bad man! How can you say such things to me? How can you, after all we’ve been to each other? You used never to do anything to hurt me. And look at you now. What has happened, Bertrand dear? It’s such a cruel world. I can’t bear it. I tell you, I can’t. I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to die, Bertrand.”
“My dear, for the first time of the hundred and one you’ve made that threat, there’s a chance of it’s coming off,” Whittaker said, and said the one thing in creation that, instead of aggravating them, could have stopped Romany’s hysterics dead in their tracks. Romany was quiet; desperately quiet. She lifted her head from the foam of maribou and looked at Whittaker with wide, distraught eyes, and parted lips.
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“What I say,” he mocked her whisper by imitating it. “Even if you escape tonight, Romany (for death, whose name you so often take in vain, is on the qui vive in the house tonight), you have Durian’s death to answer for.”
Romany screamed, and throttled the scream with her hand across her mouth.
“Bertrand! You are going—to tell—that? You’ve written it down as you wrote about Neil?”
“I have.”
“Oh, no-no-no-no. Please, no. I don’t believe it.”