“She told me, his wife herself.”
“His wife!” His head reeled.
“His deserted wife, a woman with green eyes and thin lips. I suppose you know her. She came down here to tell me.”
“My God!” cried Herold. “My God in heaven!”
And for the first time Stella saw a man in white, shaking anger, showing his teeth and shaking his fists.
“When was it?”
She told him. He controlled the riot within him and questioned her further, almost hectoringly, masterfully, and she replied like a woman compelled to obey, yet flinging her answers defiantly. And he went on unrelenting, fighting not her, but the devil that had got possession of her, until she told him all, even the final horror, as far as he could wring confession from her virgin fierceness; for, in the white-hot passion of his anger he had challenged her knowledge of evil almost as directly as the woman had done.
“And you believe her?” he cried. “You, Stellamaris, believe that murderous thing of infamy, when you 've known John Risca and his love and his tenderness all your life? You believe it possible—John and Unity? Good God! It 's monstrous! It 's hellish!”
He planted himself on the path before her, hands on hips, his sensitive face set, his blue eyes aflame, and looked at her as no man or woman had ever yet looked at Stellamaris. And she met his look, and her eyes, despite the battle her proud soul was fighting, lost their hardness, and new light flashed into them, as though they had changed from agate to diamond.
“She loves him, body and soul,” she said. “I ought to have recognized it in London. I did n't know the meaning of things then. I do now.”