“The doctors say he was poisoned. It is strange, is it not?”
“It is strange,” I answered.
The sunset hour, the knowledge that the three men in the library were hovering over an undetected crime, invested the situation with a deep gloom. The ghostlike figure of Esther at my side, from whom remorse and suffering had taken something of her bloom, seemed to me made for suffering. I felt that Fate had marked her out for some terrible experiment in sorrow; that grief had chosen her for its own, and that I ought to have foreseen it.
I had made the cardinal error of allying myself with a soul that was moving in a cycle of sorrows. It was curious that I should not have detected a fact now so apparent. One should always seek the companionship of the joyous. To walk with those who are wedded by Fate to grief is to play with fire. It is to step within influences that may destroy us. So much of the mystical I can infer. There is hidden meaning in the phrase, ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ She seemed to be afraid of her own company, and I think sought mine out of pure loneliness. I was too absorbed, however, in my own danger to comfort her. What had she to fear compared to me? She had lost something which was of purely conventional value, whilst I might be in danger of losing the essentials, life and liberty.
“I am very unhappy,” she said, in her low, musical voice, with the curious thrilling vibration that had given it such an appeal for me. “I feel as if somehow I had meant nothing but sorrow and grief to this place, as if I were of ill omen. Of course, it is presumptuous of me to even think of myself as being of so much importance.”
“You seem to think very little of me now,” I murmured. It seemed unchivalrous not to render her some comfort of the heart.
She was silent for a moment, and then pulled herself together.
“I am afraid I think of you too much.”
Even at that moment I was moved in my essential sex vanity, and was prepared to play the lover if it were worth while.
“You have been very unkind lately, Esther.”