“You fainted,” he explained.
“Oh!” she said vaguely. Then her eyes fell upon the still body stretched beside her. Her memory picked up lost threads again and she shuddered. “I—I thought—it was you.” She clung to him, her arms round him, as though she had not yet fully escaped from the horror that had held her.
“Thought it was me?” he said, and there was not such a thing as grammar in the world just then. “Why should you think that?”
“They meant to—to—kill you. One of my little boys heard them.” She began to sob softly into his coat.
Hugh’s arms tightened about her. His body glowed with a soft warm happiness. He had never known Vicky before unstrung and helpless. It was golden luck for him that he should be the man to whom she clung.
“How could they know I’d be here?” he asked gently.
“Didn’t you get a note? Bob Dodson wrote it.”
“A decoy, to bring me here?”
“Yes. They pretended it was from me.”
She disengaged herself from his arms. The instinct of sex defence against even the favoured lover was reasserting itself.