Her eyes fell for a moment before mine, and a little storm of wrinkles crossed her brow. “Impulse, impulse, I said, didn’t I? I think you wrote of it, three times at least. That first night by the tower—when I and the Parson’s sign were together inside the circle your torch had cast? Again, after Sean and I had quarrelled, and yet again as you walked up the Vale in the twilight and could not forget the quarrel. Afterward too, when you were so depressed on learning that I was to be immensely rich. You covered it well, oh, yes! But could I fail to know what was tugging at you all the while?” She raised her eyes to mine for a long, grave look. “I suppose you would call it being in love with me, wouldn’t you?”
I fought down the thing in my throat. “And suppose I was—suppose I am—what difference does it make? Must I plead guilty to a crime I never dreamed of because I had the bad luck to take a fancy to the face of a woman who’s denied to me? I was well enough when I walked on the mountain and felt as if I could move the earth. I wish to God I had stayed up there, and not come down into this place where Fate takes the strings and plays her hellish tricks!”
She gave me the most mournful look I have ever seen on any face. “That’s why I can’t despise you, you know, though I’ve tried. I can’t look on you as a—a thing of horror. You’ve played the game right through: you put down every prevarication and evasion you had made, and then you let me read the diary. You just—gave yourself away, and did it without a murmur. When you were up there alone on the Forest and exulted in your loneliness, you were a man any woman would have given a lot to march beside. And then you came down here among us—and how quickly you proved that all our gods have feet of clay.”
My indignation howled at highest pitch. “I tell you for the last time that I deny absolutely the trumped-up charge you keep senselessly repeating.”
She shook her head. “Denial’s no good. Do you think, as everyone seems to believe, that terrible machine worked by chance just now, by some overplus of pressure or loss of equilibrium? No, Mr. Bannerlee; a man set the cat purring and the claw lunging. Do you know where he is?”
Silence. . . .
“A man did it?” I repeated, my voice parched and scraping, my body numb as a block of wood. “A man—did it?” I remembered I had felt that one of us had secretly left the Hall. But no—that had been after the deviltry of the machine.
“A man in this House—in your room, Mr. Bannerlee. Twelve-fifteen was the time set.”
I saw faces leaping and jigging around me, one of them with great blue eyes and crown of golden hair swinging enormous toward me and swinging giddily away again. The door into the corridor, which I had not seen opened, was suddenly closed from outside. I heard a sea of voices, and above them shot out the voice of Crofts, booming like a huge wave:
“But my God, how was it done?”