"'I will, I must speak. Yes, blood; his blood. Oh!' she exclaimed, standing in front of me in that Cassandra-like attitude I had noticed before, 'I can see it now. George had gone to the country—so he had said—and I, to pass the time, dined with an uncle at Bignards. You know the room—the thousand lights and loaded tables, the chink of glass and glow of silver—the gay and brilliant company that is always there? We dined, and were leaving afterwards for the Opera. My uncle passed out first, and I was about to follow him, when, at a little table a deux, I saw George and her; George looking down, down into her eyes and her bosom, with a hot red flush in his cheeks, and a lifted wine-glass in his hand. I don't know what happened; I burst between them, flung the glass from his fingers, and then——'
"I thought she must scream, but only a gasp escaped her. She looked at something on the ground and added in an awed, strangely intense voice, 'He was dead!'
"The tone compelled me to her side; a torrent of agony seemed frozen at her lips.
"'Hush! Hush!' I implored. 'Your brain was deranged: you had been ill——'
"I had recovered. Did you never read of the Reymond affair? I am that miserable woman. Lucky, some people have called me, because in France they are human and class such deeds as crimes passionels.'
"My words I cannot remember. They were violent reiterations of love, assurances that I had read and recalled the catastrophe—the fatal result of a glass splint probing an artery—and had pitied her before I knew her. I protested, raved, threatened, vowed I had come with the one object of linking my life to hers, and that now, more than ever, my mind was fixed.
"But she remained cold, almost severe. 'You remember,' she said, 'how I fled from you to spare myself a Tantalus torture—a hungering for spiritual peace, a thirsting for rare devotion which you seemed to be offering with laden hands?'
"'Your longings must have been slight!' I scoffed, ungenerously.
"'Listen,' she cried, still standing rigid, though the thrilling tone of her voice confessed her emotion. 'The verdict of acquittal was merely a doom to perpetual remorse. "A life for a life," was cried to me from even the day-break cheeping of the birds. I thought to make atonement by fasting and prayer: I hoped for it in attending the stricken—walking hand-in-hand with disease. On stormy nights I fancied I might save some drowning soul from wreck; earn an innocent life at the cost of my own; I was ready—craving of God the hour and the opportunity, but it never came. I have knelt and starved, I have nursed the sick to health, I have rescued a child from the depths, and yet I live!'
"I clutched her gown, kissed it, abjured her to leave her theories of atonement with Heaven, and trust her future and its serenity to me. But she put me aside.