And to all this the assassin of Sir Digby Kemsley listened without a word, save to point to my love, and declare:
"There stands the woman who killed Marie Bracq. Arrest her!"
Phrida stood rigid, motionless as a statue.
"Yes," she exclaimed at last, with all her courage, "I—I will speak. I—I'll tell you everything. I will confess, for I cannot bear this longer. And yet, dearest," she cried, turning her face to me and looking straight into my eyes, "I love you, though I now know that after I have spoken—after I have told the truth—you will despise and hate me! Ah, God alone knows how I have suffered! how I have prayed for deliverance from this. But it cannot be. I have sinned, I suppose, and I must bear just punishment."
There was silence.
We all looked at her, though the woman Petre was still lying in her chair unconscious, and upon the assassin's lips was a grim smile.
"You recollect," Phrida said, turning to me, "you remember the day when you introduced that man to me. Well, from that hour I knew no peace. He wrote to me, asking me to meet him, as he had something to tell me concerning my future. Well, I foolishly met him one afternoon in Rumpelmeyer's, in St. James's Street, when he told me that he had purchased a very important German patent for the manufacture of certain chemicals which would revolutionise prices, and would bring upon your firm inevitable ruin, as you pursued the old-fashioned methods. But, being your friend, and respecting us both, he had decided not to go further with the new process, and though he had given a large sum of money for it, he would, in our mutual interests, not allow it to be developed. Naturally, in my innocence I thanked him, and from that moment, professing great friendliness towards you, we became friends. Sometimes I met him at the houses of friends, but he always impressed upon me the necessity of keeping our acquaintance a secret."
And she paused, placing her hand upon her heart as though to stay its throbbing.
"One afternoon," she resumed, "the day of the tragedy, I received a telegram urging me to meet him without fail at five o'clock at Rumpelmeyer's. This I did, when he imparted to me a secret—that you, dear, were in the habit of meeting, at his flat, a foreign woman named Marie Bracq, daughter of a hair-dresser in the Edgware Road; that you, whom I loved, were infatuated with her, and—and that——"
"The liar!" I cried.