‘Well,’ she said, ’I don’t mind your knowing.  You’d better not let on to him that I told you, though; he mightn’t like it.  The fact is, Arthur thought I’d done it.  He thought it was because my manner was so queer, as if I was trying to hush it up.  I was.  You see, I thought Arthur had done it.  It seemed so awfully likely.  Because, I left them quarrelling.  And Arthur’s got an awfully bad temper.  And his manner was so queer.  We never talked it out, till two days ago; we avoided talking to each other at all, almost, after the first.  But on that first morning, when he came round to see me, we somehow succeeded in diddling one another, because we were each so anxious to shield the other and hush it all up....  Clare might have saved us both quite a lot of worrying if she’d spoken out at once and said it was ... an accident.’

Jane’s voice was so unemotional, her face and manner so calm, that she is a very dark horse sometimes.  I couldn’t tell for certain whether she had nearly instead of ‘an accident’ said ‘her,’ or whether she had spoken in good faith.  I couldn’t tell how much she knew, or had been told, or guessed.

I said, ’I suppose she didn’t realise till lately that any one was likely to be suspected,’ and Jane acquiesced.

‘Clare’s funny,’ she said, after a moment.

‘People are,’ I generalised.

‘She has a muddled mind,’ said Jane.

‘People often have.’

‘You never know,’ said Jane thoughtfully, ’how much to believe of what she says.’

‘No?  I dare say she doesn’t quite know herself.’

‘She does not,’ said Jane.  ‘Poor old Clare.’

We necessarily left it at that, since Jane didn’t, of course, mean to tell me what story Clare had told of that evening’s happenings, and I couldn’t tell Jane the one Clare had told me.  I didn’t imagine I should ever be wiser than I was now on the subject, and it certainly wasn’t my business any more.

When I met Clare Potter by chance, a week or two later, on the steps of the National Gallery with another girl, she flushed, bowed, and passed me quickly.  That was natural enough, after our last interview.

Queer, that those two girls should be sisters.  They were an interesting study to me.  Clare, shallow, credulous, weak in the intelligence, conventional, emotional, sensitive, of the eternal type of orthodox and timid woman, with profound powers of passion, and that touch of melodrama, that sense of a situation, which might lead her along strange paths....  And Jane, level-headed, clear-brained, hard, calm, straight-thinking, cynical, an egotist to her finger-tips, knowing what she wanted and going for it, tough in the conscience, and ignorant of love except in its crudest form of desire for the people and things which ministered to her personal happiness....