“Madame Masque!” he said, wonderingly; “what is this?”
He bent to raise her; but, with a sort of scream she held out her arms to keep him back.
“No, no, no! Touch me not! Hate me—kill me! I have murdered your friend!”
Sir Norman recoiled as if from a deadly serpent.
“Murdered him! Madame, in Heaven's name, what have you said?”
“Oh, I have not stabbed him, or poisoned him, or shot him; but I am his murderer, nevertheless!” she wailed, writhing in a sort of gnawing inward torture.
“Madame, I do not understand you at all! Surely you are raving when you talk like this.”
Still moaning on the edge of the plague-pit, she half rose up, with both hands clasped tightly over her heart, as if she would have held back from all human ken the anguish that was destroying her,
“NO—no! I am not mad—pray Heaven I were! Oh, that they had strangled me in the first hour of my birth, as they would a viper, rather than I should have lived through all this life of misery and guilt, to end it by this last, worst crime of all!”
Sir Norman stood and looked at her still with a dazed expression. He knew well enough whose murderer she called herself; but why she did so, or how she could possibly bring about his death, was a mystery altogether too deep for him to solve.