Then Dr. Levillier knew that he looked on the former wife of the strange, cruel, dead man, whose influence had entered into the lives of his two friends.
"You may have heard of my case?" Mrs. Wilson said.
"Certainly I have."
"It was bad, even from a newspaper point of view, I believe. People congratulated me on getting rid of a brute, and thought I was all right and ought to be happy. But the newspapers and the world never knew what I had gone through, the real horrors, before I insisted on release. You started when I called my husband a brute just now, Dr. Levillier; I noticed it. The phrase hurt you, coming from any wife about any husband. I know why, a boy once told me that his mother was always drunk. He hurt me then into hating him for the rest of my days. But I called a stranger a brute, not the man I loved and married, not the man I loved after I married him. Dr. Levillier, do you believe in possessions?"
She had been gradually getting excited while she spoke, and, on the last words, she leaned forward in her chair and struck her hand down in her lap.
"Do you mean possession by the devil?" said the doctor, very quietly, opposing a strong calm to her intensity.
"Yes. I do. My experience obliges me to. I knew, for a year before I married him, I married, I lived for two years after I married him, with a man who was my conception of what a man should be, strong, gentle, tender, brave, a hero to me. I got rid of a devil, after I had endured two years of torture at his hands. It is no use to tell me those two distinct men I knew were one and the same man. My soul, my heart, declare that it's a lie. There were such differences. My husband loved music; this man hated it; yet had the power to use it as a means of tormenting me. But I needn't dwell on the evidences of change. Suffice it to say that the thing that crushed me, the thing that has brought me down into the dust where I am, dust of cowardice, and weakness, and impotence to do or to be anything, was the horror of awakening to a knowledge of that change, of having to live as wife with this devil, whom I knew not, who was a stranger to me. Only the features were my husband's, nothing else. I got rid of a stranger. The man found dead in the Euston Road was a stranger whom I hated, nothing more to me than that."
As she spoke, in a deep, resonant voice that pulsated through the room, Dr. Levillier recalled, almost with a thrill, Julian's words to him in Harley Street, on the night of the fracas with the mastiffs, words spoken about the dead Marr: "His face dead was the most absolutely direct contradiction possible to his face alive. He was not the same man." He recalled these words and the thought shot through his mind: "Did the man this woman loved return at the moment of death?"
And that change in Valentine!
He said to Mrs. Wilson, betraying none of the excitement that he really felt: