“I shall never forgive you!” she sobbed.  “I never want to touch your bloodstained fingers!  I have forgotten that I ever loved you.  You’re horrible—­do you hear?—­horrible!  And yet, I don’t mean to be left to starve.  That’s why I’ve followed you.  You’re afraid I am going to give you up to justice?  Well, I don’t know.  It depends....  Turn on the lights.  I want to see you.  Do you hear?  I want to see how you can face me.  I want to see how the memory of that afternoon has dealt with you.  Do as I tell you.  Don’t stand there glowering at me.”

He crossed the room with stumbling footsteps.

“You’ve learnt to stoop, anyhow,” she went on.  “You’re thinner, too....  My God!”

The room was suddenly flooded with light.  Philip, rigid and ghastly, was looking at her from the other side of the table.  She held up her hands as though to shut out the sight of him.

“Philip!” she shrieked.  “Philip!...  Oh, my God!”

Her eyes were lit with horror as she swayed upon her feet.  For a moment she seemed about to collapse.  Then she groped her way towards the door and stood there, clinging to the handle.  Slowly she looked around over her shoulder, her face as white as death.  She moistened her lips with her tongue, her eyes glared at him.  Behind, her brain seemed to be working.  Her first spasm of inarticulate fear passed.

“Philip—–­alive!” she muttered.  “Alive!...  Speak!  Can’t you speak to me?  Are you a ghost?”

“Of course not,” he answered, with a calm which surprised him.  “You can’t have forgotten in less than six months what I look like.”

A new expression struggled into her face.  She abandoned her grasp of the handle and came back to her former position.

“Look here,” she faltered, “if you are Philip Romilly, where’s he—­Douglas?...  Where’s Douglas?”

There was no answer.  Philip simply looked at her.  She began to shake once more upon her feet.

“Where’s Douglas?” she demanded fiercely.  “Tell me?  Tell me quickly, before I go mad!  If you are Philip Romilly alive, if it wasn’t your body they found, where’s Douglas?”

“You can guess what happened to him,” Philip said slowly.  “I met him on the towing-path by the side of the canal.  I spoke to him—­about you.  He answered me with a jest.  I think that all the passion of those grinding years of misery swept up at that moment from my heart.  I was strong—­God, how strong I was!  I took him by the throat, Beatrice.  I watched his face change.  I watched his damned, self-satisfied complacency fade away.  He lost all his smugness, and his eyes began to stare at me, and his lips grew whiter as they struggled to utter the cries for mercy which choked back.  Then I flung him in—­that’s all.  Splash!...  God, I can hear it now!  I saw his face just under the water.  Then I went on.”

“You went on?” she repeated, trembling in every limb.