But come to speech they must, and that very soon; and perhaps that curious magnification of trifles made it easier. Indeed, half the formidableness of the single question she wanted to ask him had vanished already. To say to him, now or in a few moments: "Did you kill Archie Merridew?" seemed somehow not very much more unusual than asking him the time. Now that she came to think of it, even that question seemed less important than another one: "Can you kill somebody and still be happy?" She hoped in her heart that he could. It would be his justification. Had it been an unrighteous killing, that would have been another matter; as it was, she would have had him unhappy only had he not killed. And, as he showed no sign of breaking silence, she might as well ask him that now.
So, reluctantly turning her eyes from his face and looking ahead into the haze of the rain, she suddenly said: "Are you happy?"
She wasn't surprised that he didn't reply at once. Of course men didn't. They had their usual formalities to go through, of "Why do you ask?" and so forth—a sort of routine before they could answer a plain question. As he began to go through it now she made a little impatient movement. She didn't want all that. Then he deigned to reply to her inferior intelligence. Yes, he was happy.
"You are?" she said, with an exultant little leap.
Yes, he was; but again, apparently, he couldn't say a thing and leave it. In the middle of more stupid, logical, masculine things (he seemed to be qualifying his statement with something or other about his conduct to Kitty Windus) she cut him short.
"Tell me," she said, repeating the little impatient gesture, "you killed that boy, didn't you?"
They had been following the railings that divided the Mall from St. James's Park, but she had stopped to ask her question. And she was looking full at him now. But she could not see him very well; a lamp and a plane-tree made all an obscurity of vague shadows and wet reflections. But then he stepped slowly back, taking her umbrella with him, and twice, as he held the umbrella unsteadily, the light came and went on his cheek and chin; and then, as he took a step farther back still, the umbrella bobbed on the railings, from the points of it came little bright slivers of drops, and she found herself searching under a lamplit sector of alpaca for his eyes.
The danger of asking, actually, a question you have asked, but not actually, a hundred times before, is that your own mere familiarity with it throws you out in your calculation. Now she found herself suddenly hoping that what she felt to be working beyond the umbrella edge—for she felt it rather than saw it—was not fear.
For, of course, she had miscalculated a little—had been stupid to think that it was all as old a story to him as it was to her. Obviously it would not at once occur to him that there had been nothing to find out, but that instead the whole thing had been merely enacted before her eyes; he was sure to be thinking that on some point of evidence he had been betrayed. What sort of point that could be, unless it had something to do with the black eyes that seemed to haunt Kitty, he might know, but she could not guess; and all at once she had a purely physical shrinking. She would rather not know. She could string herself up to the thought of murder, but the bestial details—no, not those. Those were his affairs. They were to be taken for granted as things necessarily involved. And already she was on the point of feeling herself a little disappointed in him. For in the shadow of the umbrella her eyes had now found his; his head was a little turned, and she saw the whites of them.
It was fear. She, it seemed, could contemplate unafraid a sacrifice that he quaked to have carried out.