“Don’t take it so badly, old chap. Nobody ever gets punished for murder in France. They’ll bring in a verdict of crime passionnel, and you’ll be acquitted. But tell me, quick. What’s happened?”
He went on in that broken, excited way.
“She did not know we had seen her that night. She came to me with the most brazen effrontery. Pretended to sympathise with Rougette; wanted me to take her back as a model. That was what maddened me, the smiling, damned hypocrisy of her. Oh! devil! devil!”
“Go on, quick; what did you do?”
“I told her I was going to paint a picture of Mazeppa and wanted her to pose for me.”
“But Mazeppa wasn’t a female.”
“She doesn’t know that. Well, on impulse I posed her on that dummy horse I have, and I bound her to its back with straps, bound her so strongly she could not move a muscle. She submitted till I had pulled the last buckle, then she got alarmed, but I snapped a gag in her mouth before she could scream.”
“Yes, yes, and then?”
Lorrimer drew a long, shuddering breath.
“And then, Madden, I—I varnished her.”