"I knew that you loved him."
"I had been your faithful and obedient wife."
"Faithful and obedient; yes—a man might buy faith and obedience in any market. I knew that other man was master of your heart. Great Heaven, can I forget how I saw you that night, hanging upon his words, all your soul in your eyes."
"We were talking of life and death. It was not his words that thrilled me; but the deep thoughts they stirred within me—thoughts of the great mystery—the life beyond the veil. Do you know what it is to speculate upon the life beyond this life, when you are talking to a man who bears the stamp of death upon his brow, who is as surely devoted to the grave as Socrates was when he talked to his friends in the prison. But why do I talk to you of these things? You cannot understand——"
"No! I am outside the pale, am I not?" sneered Leonard; "made of a different clay from that sickly sentimental worshipper of yours, who turned to you when he had worn himself out in the worship of ballet-girls. I was not half fine enough for you, could not talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Was it a pleasant sensation for me, do you think, to see you two sentimentalizing and poetizing, day after day—Beethoven here and Byron there, and all the train of maudlin modern versifiers who have made it their chief business to sap the foundations of domestic life."
"Why did you bring him into your house?"
"Why? Can't you guess? Because I wanted to know the utmost and the worst; to watch you two together; to see what venom was left in the old poison; to make sure, if I could, that you were staunch; to put you to the test."
"God knows I never faltered, throughout that ordeal," said Christabel, solemnly. "And yet you murdered him. You ask me how I know of that murder. Shall I tell you? You were at the Kieve that day; you did not go by the beaten track where the ploughmen must have seen you. No! you crept in by stealth the other way—clambered over the rocks—ah! you start. You wonder how I know that. You tore your coat in the scramble across the arch, and a fragment of the cloth was caught upon a bramble. I have that scrap of cloth, and I have the shooting-jacket from which it was torn, under lock and key in yonder wardrobe. Now, will you deny that you were at the Kieve that day?"
"No. I was there. Hamleigh met me there by appointment. You were right in your suspicion that night. We did quarrel—not about you—but about his treatment of that Vandeleur girl. I thought he had led her on—flirted with her—fooled her——"
"You thought," ejaculated Christabel, with ineffable scorn.