“Why should he have assumed madness?”
Lady Lochinvar shrugged her portly shoulders, and lifted her finely-arched eyebrows with a little foreign air which had grown upon her in foreign society.
“To escape from a very awkward dilemma. He was arrested on suspicion of having killed his wife. The evidence against him was weak, but the circumstances of the poor thing’s death were very suspicious.”
“How did she die?”
“She threw herself—or she was thrown—from a cliff on the other side of the promontory which you may see from that window.”
Mildred was silent for some moments, while her breath came and went in hurried gasps.
“Might she not have fallen accidentally?” she faltered.
“That would have been hardly possible. It was a place where she had been in the habit of walking for weeks—a path which anybody might walk upon in the daylight without the slightest danger. And the calamity happened in broad day. She could not have fallen accidentally. Either she threw herself over, or he pushed her over in a moment of ungovernable anger. She was a very provoking woman, and had a tongue which might goad a man to fury. I saw a good deal of her the winter before her death. She was remarkably clever, and she amused me. I had a kind of liking for her, and I used to let her tell me her troubles.”
“What kind of troubles?”
“O, they all began and ended in one subject. She was jealous, intolerably jealous, of her husband; suspected him of inconstancy to herself if he was commonly civil to a handsome woman. She watched him like a lynx, and did her utmost to make his life a burden to him, yet loved him passionately all the time in her vehement, wrong-headed manner.”