"If you will come with me into the other room, I will give you an explanation."
I made an awkward movement forward, my impulse being to conceal from her what was lying on the floor. She detecting my uneasiness, perceiving there was something which I would conceal, swept into the room, straight to where Vernon lay.
"Decimus! Decimus!"
She called to him. Had the tone in which she spoke, then, been in her voice when she enacted her parts in the dramas of the mimic stage, her audiences would have had no cause to complain that she was wooden. She turned to me, as if at a loss to comprehend her lover's silence.
"Is he sleeping?" I was silent. Then, with a little gasp, "Is he dead?" I still made no reply. She read my meaning rightly. Even from where I was standing, I could see her bosom rise and fall. She threw out both her arms in front of her. "I am glad!" she cried, "I am glad that he is dead!"
She took me, to say the least of it, aback.
"Why should you be glad?"
"Why? Because, now, she will not have him!"
I had forgotten, for the instant, what Crampton had spluttered out upon the doorstep. Her words recalled it to my mind. "Don't you know that he lied to me, and I believed his lies."
She turned to Vernon with a gesture of scorn so frenzied, so intense, that it might almost have made the dead man writhe.