"I hope she doesn't think of it at all. As far as I've been able——"
"Yes, yes, yes.... Plainly, then, have you told her? Told her what you did?"
"Told her? No!"
"Have you thought of telling her?"
"Have I thought ... do you mean have I thought of killing her too?"
Louie was suddenly silent. A hansom slipped swiftly through the deserted Square, its wheels making no sound and the slap of the horse's hoofs dying gradually away in the distance. The rain had stopped, but the trees still dripped sadly, and something vague and far away had approached, resolved itself into a policeman's shining cape, and passed again before Louie spoke.
"Well," she said slowly, "after all, that's not the immediate point. That comes later. The first thing's Kitty's condition. That condition, as far as I can make it out, is this. You showed yourself clever and unscrupulous almost beyond belief in one thing, and she found you out in that; now, I fancy, she thinks there's no end to your cleverness and unscrupulousness. Positively no end. You're capable de tout.... So she broods. Of course she ought never to have been allowed to live alone.... And she knows she has these—fancies—about you—and so when she's all right she's quite persuaded they are fancies. And most of the time she is all right. Then the fits come, and—she's off."
A quick shiver took me. "Do you mean——?" I faltered.
"Violently? Oh no. At the best she's just as she used to be; at the worst she's merely helpless, a child. Otherwise I should never dare to have her come and live with me."
"What, you're——?"