“But how? What—”
“I carried it away, and dropped it through an ice-hole in the river. It will never be found until the ice breaks up in the spring, and then it is not at all likely. I took a little risk, I know; but I did it for your sake, believe me, Joy, quite as much as for my own.”
“I do not understand how it affected you,” faltered the girl.
“Perhaps not,” answered Rayner suavely. “But you have heard the reason. I loved you. I wanted to marry you, even at that time I wanted you; for I recognized that you were distraught when you—”
“Oh please! Please! Do not say it!” she cried.
“Very well,” he answered. “I will not. But you understand the position, and I think you will agree that knowing what I know there are not a great number of men who would wish to marry you.”
“And why should you?” she asked quickly.
“Again because I love you.”
She sat there in silence, staring absently at a vase of chrysanthemums on the table, and seeing them not at all. In her mind she was again living through the horror of that night at North Star, searching for something that would give the lie to Adrian Rayner’s statement. And suddenly she remembered something. That sled which had halted in the wood. Who had been with it? Her gaze moved quickly from the vase to her cousin’s face, and on it she surprised a cynical, calculating look that stirred deep distrust in her.
“You say you dropped Dick Bracknell’s body through the ice? It was rather a long way to the river. How did you get it there?”