heart or that should influence him.  Yes, he might smile and not be afraid.  And indeed her delicate conscience was another grace in his eyes.  He loved her more than ever for the honesty that must confess all its little sins.  Sweet Leam!  Leam having to confess!  Leam! she who was almost too modest for an ordinary lover’s comfort, needing to be tamed out of her savage bashfulness, not to be reproved for transgressing the proper reticence of an English maid.  It was a pretty play, but it was only a play.

“Come and sit by me and make full confession, my darling,” he said lovingly.

“I will stand where I am.  You sit,” said Leam, without looking at him.

He seated himself on the sofa.  “And now what has my little culprit to say for herself?” he asked pleasantly, putting on a playful magisterial air.

“It is over,” said Leam, her hands pressed in each other with so tight a clasp that the strained knuckles were white and started.  “You must not love me:  I cannot be your wife.”

“Why?” He showed his square white teeth beneath the golden sweep of his moustache, his moist red lips parted, always smiling.

“I have done a great crime,” said Leam in a low, monotonous voice.

“A crime!  That is a large word for a small peccadillo—­larger than any sin of yours merits, my sweetheart.”

“You do not know,” said Leam with a despairing gesture.  “How can you know when you have not heard?”

“Well, what may be its name?” he asked, willing to humor her.

She paused for a moment:  then with a visible effort, drawing in her breath, she said, in a voice that was unnaturally calm and low, “I killed madame.”

“Leam!” cried Edgar, “how can you talk such nonsense?  The thing is growing beyond a joke.  Unsay your words; they are a wrong done to me.”

He had started to his feet while he spoke, and now stood before her with a strangely scared and startled face.  Naturally, as such a man would, he was resolute not to accept such a terrible confession, and one so unlikely, so impossible; but something in the girl’s voice and manner, something in its sad, still reality, seemed to overpower his determination to find this simply a bad joke which she was playing off on his credulity.  And then the thing fitted only too well.  He had heard half a dozen times of Madame de Montfort’s sudden death, and how very strange it was that the draught which she had taken so often with impunity before should have been found so laden with prussic acid on the first night of her homecoming as to kill her in an instant—­how strange, too, that not the strictest search or inquiry could come upon a trace of such poison bought or possessed by any member of the family, for what police-officer would look to find a sixty-minim bottle of prussic acid concealed among the coils of a young girl’s hair?  And when Leam said in that quiet if desperate manner that it was she who had killed madame, her words made the whole mystery clear and solved the as yet unsolved problem.