"Certainly. I myself didn't see her but—" he laughed—"she seemed to be at home to her ex-husband."
"Rix!"
"It's a fact. He went back there for breakfast this morning after he'd changed his clothes."
"After—what?"
"Yes. It seems that they started out in a canoe about midnight and he didn't turn up at Witch-Hollow until just before breakfast—and then he only stayed long enough to change to boating flannels.... You should see him; he's twenty years younger.... I fancy they'll get along together in future."
"Oh, Rix!" she said, "that was darling of you! You are wonderful even if you don't seem to know it!... And to think—to think that Mary Ledwith is going to be happy again!... Oh, you don't know how it has been with her—the silly, unhappy little thing!
"Why, after Mrs. Sprowl left, the girl went all to pieces. Molly and I did what we could—but Molly isn't strong and Mrs. Ledwith was at my house almost all the time—Oh, it was quite dreadful, and I'm sure she was really losing her senses—because—I think I'll tell you—I tell you everything—" She hesitated, and then, lowering her voice:
"She had come to see me, and she was lying on the lounge in my dressing-room, crying; and I was doing my hair. And first I knew she sobbed out that she had killed her husband and wanted to die, and she caught up that pistol that Sir Charles gave me at the Bazaar last winter—it looked like a real one—and the next thing I knew she had fired a charge of Japanese perfume at her temple, and it was all over her face and hair!... Don't laugh, Rix; she thought she had killed herself, and I had a horrid, messy time of it reviving her."
"You poor child," he exclaimed trying not to laugh—"she had no brains to blow out anyway.... That's a low thing to say. Ledwith likes her.... I really believe she's been scared into life-long good behaviour."
"She wasn't—really—horrid," said Strelsa in a low voice. "She told me so."