“What is it?” cried Sylvia. Instinctively she felt that under this troubled surface some evil thing was stirring, that the issues perhaps were not quite as simple as she had deemed them.
There was a pause. O’Moy, with his back to the window now, his hands still clasped behind him, looked mockingly at Tremayne and waited.
“Why don’t you answer her?” he said at last. “You were confidential enough when I came in. Can it be that you are keeping something back, that you have secrets from the lady who has no doubt promised by now to become your wife as the shortest way to mending her recent folly?”
Tremayne was bewildered. His answer, apparently an irrelevance, was the mere enunciation of the thoughts O’Moy’s announcement had provoked.
“Do you mean to say that you have known throughout that I did not kill Samoval?” he asked.
“Of course. How could I have supposed you killed him when I killed him myself?”
“You? You killed him!” cried Tremayne, more and more intrigued. And—
“You killed Count Samoval?” exclaimed Miss Armytage.
“To be sure I did,” was the answer, cynically delivered, accompanied by a short, sharp laugh. “When I have settled other accounts, and put all my affairs in order, I shall save the provost-marshal the trouble of further seeking the slayer. And you didn’t know then, Sylvia, when you lied so glibly to the court, that your future husband was innocent of that?”
“I was always sure of it,” she answered, and looked at Tremayne for explanation.