Suddenly Lady Ingleton’s face flushed, her dark eyes flashed and then filled with tears, and she said in a voice that shook with emotion:
“Dion Leith killed a body by accident, the body of his little boy. She is murdering a soul deliberately, the soul of her husband.”
She did not know at all why she was so suddenly and so violently moved. She had not expected this abrupt access of feeling. It had rushed upon her from she knew not where. She was startled by it.
“I don’t know why I should care,” she commented, as if half ashamed of herself.
Then she added, with a touch of almost shy defiance:
“But I do care, I do care. That’s why I’ve come here.”
“You are right to care if it is so,” said Father Robertson.
“Such lots of women wouldn’t,” she continued, in a quite different, almost cynical, voice. “But that man is an exceptional man—not in intellect, but in heart. And I’m a very happy woman. Perhaps you wonder what that has to do with it. Well sometimes I see things through my happiness, just because of it; sometimes I see unhappiness through it.”
Her voice had changed again, had become much softer. She drew her chair a little nearer to the fire.
“Do you ever receive confessions, Mr. Robertson—as a priest, I mean?” she asked.