“Neither can I,” he said. “Girls of her excitable temperament are apt to make statements of that character utterly without foundation. No doubt Dudley was her intimate friend, and finding him dead, her romantic mind at once conjured up visions of murder.”
“Yes. There is a good deal in your argument,” I admitted, with a touch of sorrow at the remembrance that Ogle had aspired to her hand.
“I never spoke to you on the subject, for fear of making mischief, but I have many times been amazed at your blindness when Dudley and Ella used to flirt openly before your very eyes,” he observed, glancing at me.
“Ah! you are right,” I cried angrily. “I foolishly trusted him, believing implicitly in his honour and in Ella’s purity.”
“Of the latter you surely have no cause for suspicion,” he exclaimed quickly.
“I am not so certain,” I replied with bitterness. “The more deeply I attempt to probe this mystery, the more sorrow I heap upon myself. I was happy in the belief that she loved no other man except me, yet apparently she is as tactful as an adventuress, and delights in toying with a man’s affections.”
“Every woman is fickle,” my friend remarked sympathetically. “If she is thrown into the society of one man frequently, and passes idle hours alone with him, she either ends in loving him or hating him. There is little purely platonic friendship between men and women nowadays.”
“Yes, alas!” I echoed, as we entered the carriage drive and passed the well-remembered spot where I had discovered the body. “There is very little indeed.”
A quarter of an hour later I stood alone before the window of the bright morning-room which commanded a beautiful view of the brilliant, sunlit Thames, and the row of tall, swaying poplars and drooping, wind-whitened willows on the opposite shore. I was awaiting Ella, who had, her maid told me, gone to her room.
Presently, pale-faced and trembling, she entered, and, closing the door, moved slowly towards me, stretching forth her hand in silence, her tearful eyes downcast. I grasped the slim, white fingers, and found them cold as marble.