“Why do you ask me that?”
“You look as if you weren’t,” said Myra. “I know there has been trouble to-day.”
He had always stood in some awe of this efficient automaton of a woman, who had never given him a shadow of offence, but in whom he had divined a jealousy which he had always striven to propitiate. But now she awakened a forlorn sense of dignity.
He picked up his suit-case.
“What has that got to do with you, Myra?”
“If Mrs. Triona’s room was on fire and I rushed in through the flames to save her, would you ask me what business it was of mine?”
The artist in him wondered for a moment at her even, undramatic presentation of the hypothesis. He could not argue the point, however, knowing her life’s devotion to Olivia. So yielding to the unlit, pale blue eyes in the woman’s unemotional face, he said:
“Yes. There is trouble. Deadly trouble. It’s all my doing. You quite understand that?”
“It couldn’t be anything else, sir,” said Myra.
“And so I’m going away and never coming back.”