"While you have been basking in your 'paradise' dreaming your short-lived vision of love, I have watched and waited, prowling to and fro with 'Help,' a faithful servant, at my heels. Your dog scented me, he proclaimed my presence, so I let 'Help' silence him once and for all. Many a night when you sat together, there in that verandah, your hand linked in his ringless fingers, your eyes feasting on his false face, I crouched below, watching. Did you never feel my nearness? Ah, you shudder! It was strange—very strange. It maddened me that he should wear your ring—my ring—so I wrenched it from him."
She listens like one in the thralls of a hideous nightmare. If Carol comes now—he is lost!
"Why, when I had him by the throat," asks Philip, "did I not strangle the life from his body? Why did I stay my hand? How was it I watched your happiness with hungry eyes, and did not strike? I could have shot you dead in each other's arms scores of times. I inexorably determined on his death, but held the sword suspended, like Damocles, by a single hair."
She listens acutely to his every syllable.
"Why?" she stammers feebly, her mind groping in the dark.
"So long as he was faithful to you—so long as he valued what you flung at his feet, I would not wake you from your Elysium. By this I proved the love you discredit. My action should not plunge you into an abyss of woe; but now that he is false—false as Hell——"
"Liar!" breaks in Eleanor hotly; "your miserable accusation is unfounded."
"Wait. When he left you for long days of 'sport,' what do you think was the nature of that chase?"
Eleanor is silent, numbed by dread and despair.
"His game—was a woman, who knew from his lips your whole history. I have seen them together for hours at a time—heard them speak—jest at your expense. But, in spite of this, she was jealous of you, and, but for a bad shot, would have taken your life that day in the jungle, when I killed her horse under her. You see I was guarding you, Eleanor. He has been scheming to go away with her; to desert you as a toy that is broken—a flower which has lost its scent."