"My conscience? Have I had one!"
"You have a strong conscience."
"Deo gratias. Then you have unearthed it, madame."
A vein of infinite bitterness and melancholy seemed to glimmer in his mood. It was a moment of self-speculation. The girl still looked up into his face.
"Why did you kill that woman?"
"Why?"
"Her dead face haunts me, I see it everywhere; there is some strange shadow over my soul. O that I could get her last cry from my ears!"
Fulviac, with a sudden burst of cynicism, broke into grim laughter, a sound like the rattling of dry bones in a closet. The girl shrank away with her lips twitching.
"Why cannot you trust me with the truth?"
"Truth is not always beneficent. It was a matter of policy, of diplomacy."