She uttered the question with a shrinking dread that seemed to run shuddering through her whole body.  And because he did not instantly reply, her face whitened with a sick suspense.

“Oh, she didn’t!” she gasped imploringly.  “Say she didn’t!  I—­I think it would break my heart if—­if—­if—­that—­had happened.”

“You must remember that she was not responsible for her actions,” Max said.

Olga was trembling all over.  “Then she did?”

He avoided the question.  “Her life was over,” he said, “in any case.”

“Then she did?” Again sharply she put the question, as though goaded thereto by an intolerable pain.  “Max,” she said, “oh, Max, I could bear anything better than that!  I don’t believe it of her!  I can’t believe it!”

“But why torture yourself in this way?” he said.  “What do you gain by it?”

“Because I must, I must!” she answered feverishly.  “I dream about her night after night—­night after night.  My mind is never at rest about her.  She seems to be calling to me, trying to tell me something.  And I never can get to her or hear what it is.  It’s all because I can’t remember.  And sometimes I feel as if I shall go mad myself with trying.”

“Olga!” Briefly and sternly he checked her.  “You are getting hysterical.  Don’t you think there has been enough of this?  If you go any further, you will regret it.”

“But I must know!” she said.  “Max, was it so?  Did she take her own life?”

“She did not!”

Quietly he answered her, so quietly that for a moment she could hardly believe that he had given a definite reply.  She stared at him incredulously.

“You are telling me the truth?” she said piteously at length.  “You won’t try to deceive me any more?”

“I have told you the truth,” he said.

“Then—­then—­” She still gazed at him with wide eyes, eyes in which a certain horror gradually dawned and spread.  “I am sure she did not die a natural death,” she said with conviction.

Max was silent, grimly, inexorably silent.

She disengaged herself slowly from him.  Her forehead drew itself into the old painful lines.  She passed an uncertain hand across it.

As if in answer to the gesture he spoke, bluntly, almost brutally.  “If you will have it, you shall; but remember, it is final.  Miss Campion was suffering from a hideous and absolutely incurable disease of the brain which had developed into homicidal madness.  She might have lived for years—­a blinded soul fettered to a brain of raving insanity.  What her life would have been, only those who have seen can picture.  But, mercifully for her—­rightly or wrongly is not for me to say—­her torment was brought to an early end.  In fact, almost before it had begun, a friend gave her deliverance.  She died—­as you know—­suddenly.”

“Ah!” With a cry she broke in upon him.  “It was—­the pain-killer!”

“It was.”  He scarcely opened his lips to reply, and instantly closed them in a single unyielding line.  His eyes never left her face.