"I wish to Heaven there could be any doubt of it!" groaned the young man. "My aim is unerring; I saw him fall, shot through the heart."
His voice died away in a hoarse whisper. Again there was a pause.
"Your provocation was great," said Reginald. "If anything can extenuate killing a fellow-creature, it is that. Are you quite positive—But perhaps I have no right to speak on this matter."
"Speak, speak!" broke out Harry Danton. "I am shut up in these horrible rooms from week's end to week's end, until it is the only thing that keeps me from going mad—talking of what I have done. What were you going to say?"
"I wanted to ask you if you were quite certain—beyond the shadow of doubt—of your wife's guilt? We sometimes make terrible mistakes in these matters."
"There was no mistake," replied his companion, with a sudden look of anguish, "there could be none. I saw and heard as plainly as I see and hear you now. There could be no mistake."
"Do you know where your—where she is now?"
"No!" with that look of anguish still. "No, I have never heard of her since that dreadful night. She may be dead, or worse than dead, long ere this."
"You loved her very much," said Reginald, impelled to say it by the expression of that ghastly face.
"Loved her?" he repeated. "I have no words to tell you how I loved her. I thought her all that was pure, and innocent, and beautiful, and womanly, and she—oh, fool, that I was to believe her as I did!—to think, as she made me think, that I had her whole heart!"