“Did they see her fall?”
“No, madame.”
“And yet people have dared to call her husband a murderer.”
“Ah, but, madame, it was the general opinion. Was it not his guilty conscience that drove him mad? He came here once only after he left the madhouse, wandered about the village for an hour or two, went up to the cemetery and looked once—but once only—at the poor lady’s grave, and then drove away as if devils were hunting him. Who can doubt that it was his hand that sent her to her death?”
“No one would believe it who knew him.”
“Everybody at St. Jean believed it, even the people who liked him best.”
Mildred turned from her sick at heart. She gave the woman some more money, and then with briefest adieu walked back to the inn where she had left the carriage, and where the horse was dozing with his nose in a bag of dried locust fruit, while his driver sprawled half asleep upon the rough stone parapet between the inn and the bay.
Pamela received her aunt graciously on her return to the hotel, and seemed in better spirits than she had been since she left Pallanza.
“Your Lady Lochinvar has written me the sweetest little note, asking me to dine with her and go to the opera afterwards,” she said. “I feel sure this must be your doing, aunt.”