“Has this been your dominant emotion all the time?” he said, harshly. “I am glad our ways lie separate.”
“I have my interests to protect,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders, walked past her to the fireplace and leant his broad shoulders against the black marble mantelpiece. Her selfishness dumbfounded him. Her eyes bore no trace of tears, her attitude not a suggestion of grief. Ill and worn she looked; but from shock and strain and anxiety—not from sorrow. Had she no human feeling? And yet she was the same woman whose heart had throbbed with wild tumult against his; whose eyes had glowed with a burning passion in their slumberous depths; whose voice had melted into murmurings like the deep notes of the mating dove. Once he had compared her in his mind to a volcano. The aptness of the similitude occurred to him now. She had passed through her period of eruption. Now the molten fire of her nature was cold and unlovely lava.
She moved suddenly from the table with the dragging step of exhaustion, and flung herself into a chair and lay with her head bowed upon her arm.
“I know how you judge me,” she said, hoarsely. “You have always judged me, and that is one of the things that made me hate you. You think I ought to be in floods of tears. So I should have been, if it had not been for last night. But I must protect myself now or never. No one can do it for me. How was I to know that you would be discreet? I had ruin staring me in the face. I have strained every nerve to keep my wits till you came. You can’t tell the agony of the strain. How could you? And this awful horror overwhelming me. Oh, God—don’t you think I feel the horror of it?”
She did not raise her face, but remained with it buried on her arm in an attitude of profound prostration. Soon a shudder ran through her frame. She began to moan and sob. An impulse of pity brought him to her side.
“If I can be of any help to you, Minna, you only have to command me.”
But she did not heed him, only waved him away with her free hand.
“Go—leave me,” she said, scarce audibly.
“If you want me, send for me and I will come,” he said. He left her, went into the hall, where he found the Inspector. To the latter’s questions he gave what formal answers lay in his power. A news agency representative joined them soon afterwards. Gradually Hugh acquainted himself with all the meagre facts in the possession of the police. Mr. Hart had been killed outright by one blow of a blunt, heavy instrument. Death must have occurred during the small hours. The safe in the study was found open. The only article apparently missing from it was a black deed-box, which Mr. Hart’s confidential clerk, who had been summoned immediately, stated to have contained bonds. There were no other signs of robbery. A thorough inspection of the premises had discovered no traces of burglarious entry, the only possibility of which was by means of a window that had been left unsecured. Footprints there were none, owing to the slight fall of snow. For the present the police were entirely at a loss.