Christabel was on her knees in a recess near her bed—a recess which held a little table, with her devotional books and a prie-dieu chair. A beautiful head of the Salvator Mundi, painted on china at Munich, gave beauty and sanctity to this little oratory. She was kneeling on the prie-dieu, her arms folded on the purple velvet cushion, her head leaning forward on the folded arms, in an attitude of prostration and self-abandonment, her hair falling loosely over her white dressing gown. She rose at Leonard's entrance, and confronted him, a ghostlike figure, deadly pale.
"Your lover has given me the slip," he said, roughly; "why didn't you go with him? You mean to go, I have no doubt. You have both made your plans to that end—but you want to sneak away—to get clear of this country, perhaps, before people have found out what you are. Women of your stamp don't mind what scandal they create, but they like to be out of the row."
"You are mistaken," his wife answered, coldly, unmoved by his anger, as she had ever been untouched by his love. "The man who left here this morning was never my lover—never could have been, had he and I lived under the same roof for years. But I intended him for the avenger of that one man whom I did love, with all my heart and soul—the man you killed."
"What do you mean?" faltered Leonard, with a dull grey shade creeping over his face.
It had been in his mind for a long time that his secret was suspected by his wife—but this straight, sudden avowal of the fact was not the less a shock to him.
"You know what I mean. Did you not know when you came back to this house that I had fathomed your mystery—that I knew whose hand killed Angus Hamleigh. You did know it, Leonard: you must have known: for you knew that I was not a woman to fling a wife's duty to the winds, without some all-sufficient reason. You knew what kind of wife I had been for four dull, peaceful years—how honestly I had endeavoured to perform the duty which I took upon myself in loving gratitude to your dear mother. Did you believe that I could change all at once—become a heartless, empty-headed lover of pleasure—hold you, my husband, at arm's length—outrage propriety—defy opinion—without a motive so powerful, a purpose so deadly and so dear, that self-abasement, loss of good name, counted for nothing with me."
"You are a fool," said Leonard, doggedly. "No one at the inquest so much as hinted at foul play. Why should you suspect any one?"
"For more than one good reason. First, your manner on the night before Angus Hamleigh's death—the words you and he spoke to each other at the door of his room. I asked you then if there were any quarrel between you, and you said no: but even then I did not believe you."
"There was not much love between us. You did not expect that, did you?" asked her husband savagely.
"You invited him to your house; you treated him as your friend. You had no cause to distrust him or me. You must have known that."