They saw the colour leave his face. They saw his arms drop limply to his sides, and his eyes dilate with obvious sudden fear.
“A... a trail of blood?” he faltered stupidly.
“Aye, answer that!” cut in Sir John, fetched suddenly from out his doubts by that reminder.
Sir Oliver turned upon Killigrew again. The knight’s words restored to him the courage of which Rosamund’s had bereft him. With a man he could fight; with a man there was no need to mince his words.
“I cannot answer it,” he said, but very firmly, in a tone that brushed aside all implications. “If you say it was so, so it must have been. Yet when all is said, what does it prove? Does it set it beyond doubt that it was I who killed him? Does it justify the woman who loved me to believe me a murderer and something worse?” He paused, and looked at her again, a world of reproach in his glance. She had sunk to a chair, and rocked there, her fingers locking and interlocking, her face a mask of pain unutterable.
“Can you suggest what else it proves, sir?” quoth Sir John, and there was doubt in his voice.
Sir Oliver caught the note of it, and a sob broke from him.
“O God of pity!” he cried out. “There is doubt in your voice, and there is none in hers. You were my enemy once, and have since been in a mistrustful truce with me, yet you can doubt that I did this thing. But she... she who loved me has no room for any doubt!”
“Sir Oliver,” she answered him, “the thing you have done has broken quite my heart. Yet knowing all the taunts by which you were brought to such a deed I could have forgiven it, I think, even though I could no longer be your wife; I could have forgiven it, I say, but for the baseness of your present denial.”
He looked at her, white-faced an instant, then turned on his heel and made for the door. There he paused.