Clarice turned away.  Drake watched her set a foot upon the rail of the fender, lay her hand upon the mantelshelf and support her forehead upon it.  After a little she raised her head and spoke with an air of apologising for him.

‘Of course,’ she said.  ’You could not know that there was anything between myself and—­and him.’

’No; I could not know that.  How should I, for I did not know you?  And I am glad that I didn’t know.’

Drake spoke with some earnestness, and Clarice looked at him in surprise.

‘It would have made my duty so much harder to do,’ he explained.

With a little cry of irritation Clarice slipped her foot from the fender and moved from him back to the couch.  She had given him the opportunity to escape from his position and he refused to make use of it; he seemed indeed unable to perceive it.  However, she clung to it obstinately and repeated it.

‘You could not know there was anything between us’; she emphasised the words deliberately.  Drake mistook the intention of the emphasis.

‘But was there,’ he exclaimed, ’at the time?  I didn’t think of that, Miss Le Mesurier—­’

‘Oh no, no!’ she interrupted.  ‘Not at the time.’  The man was impracticable, and yet his very impracticability aroused in a measure her admiration.  ‘So you would have shot him just the same, had you known?’

‘Shot him?’ asked Drake almost absently.

‘Yes.’

’Didn’t I tell you?  I beg your pardon.  I didn’t shoot him at all.  I hanged him.’

Clarice was stunned by the words, and the more because of the dull, seemingly callous accent with which they were spoken.

‘You hanged him!’ she whispered, dropping the words one by one, as though she was striving to weigh them.

‘Yes.  I have been blamed for it,’ he replied with no change of voice.  ’People said I was damaging the prestige of the white man.  The argument bothered me, I confess, but I think they were wrong.  I should have damaged that prestige infinitely more if I had punished him secretly or—­’

‘Oh, don’t!’ she cried, with a sharp interruption, and she stared at him with eyes dilating in horror, almost in fear.  ’You can discuss it like that,—­the man I had been engaged to,—­you hanged him!’

She ended with a moan of actual pain and covered her face with her hands.  On the instant Drake woke to a full comprehension of all that he had said, and understood something of the humiliation which it meant to her.

Clarice was sitting huddled in her chair, her fingers pressed lightly on her eyes, while now and again a shiver shot through her frame.

‘Still I was bound to tell her,’ Drake thought.  He waited for a little, wondering whether she would look up, but she made no movement.  An emerald ring upon her finger caught the light and winked at him maliciously, leering at him, he fancied.  There was nothing more for him to say, and he quietly went out of the room.