They shut themselves in the drawing-room. Pamela abandoned herself to the luxury of the fire. Jethro paced about nervously, his ears alert for wheels.
“Egbert can do nothing,” he said. “The poor chap was dead when I found him—dead and stiff. He must have been in the pond some time. If I hadn’t found him to-night the ice would have pinned him in by to-morrow. We should have been obliged to cut him out. I can’t think how he got in. It isn’t dark: he never drank—too much. His head was strong. He could stand a lot of whisky. We don’t know——”
“We shall never know,” she said with the oddest lethargy.
All the time he walked about the room, indulging as he did so in kind commonplace reflections concerning Edred, she was saying to herself—lilting the words to a queer dancing air that hummed in her head:
“Free, free, free.”
She tried herself, probed herself, insisted on proving. She recalled all sorts of things—her happiest, tenderest moments with the dead man. She felt nothing at all, except faint disgust for the woman—it could not have been herself—who had so madly loved that creature who was lying in the barn searching the roof with his fixed, shallow eyes.
“No,” she said, half to herself, half to Jethro, “I don’t feel.”
She waited a moment, let that flow of recollections rush on. Nothing touched her. It had been another woman—a dogged, shameful, spiritless creature. She repeated devotionally, as if she had been kneeling in a great church, swept by religious frenzy:
“I thank God. I don’t feel.”
*****