“The letter—­Fellowes’ letter to you.”

“I dropped it last night,” she said, in a voice grown strangely impersonal and colourless.  “I dropped it in Rudyard’s room, I suppose.”

She seemed not to have any idea of excluding the terrible facts, but to be speaking as it were to herself and of something not vital, though her whole person was transformed into an agony which congealed the lifeblood.

Her voice sounded tuneless and ragged.  “He read it—­Rudyard read a letter which was not addressed to him!  He read a letter addressed to me—­he read my letter....  It gave me no chance.”

“No chance—?”

A bitter indignation was added to the cheerless discord of her tones.  “Yes, I had a chance, a last chance—­if he had not read the letter.  But now, there is no chance....  You read it, too.  You read the letter which was addressed to me.  No matter what it was—­my letter, you read it.”

“Rudyard said to me in his terrible agitation, ’Read that letter, and then tell me what you think of the man who wrote it.’ . . .  I thought it was the letter I wrote to you, the letter I posted to you last night.  I thought it was my letter to you.”

Her eyes had a sudden absent look.  It was as though she were speaking in a trance.  “I answered that letter—­your letter.  I answered it this morning.  Here is the answer . . . here.”  She laid a letter on the table before him, then drew it back again into her lap.  “Now it does not matter.  But it gives me no chance....”

There was a world of despair and remorse in her voice.  Her face was wan and strained.  “No chance, no chance,” she whispered.

“Rudyard did not kill him?” she asked, slowly and cheerlessly, after a moment, as though repeating a lesson.  “Why?”

“I stopped him.  I prevented him.”

“You prevented him—­why?” Her eyes had a look of unutterable confusion and trouble.  “Why did you prevent it—­you?”

“That would have hurt you—­the scandal, the grimy press, the world.”

Her voice was tuneless, and yet it had a strange, piteous poignancy.  “It would have hurt me—­yes.  Why did you not want to hurt me?”

He did not answer.  His hands had gone into his pockets, as though to steady their wild nervousness, and one had grasped the little weapon of steel which Rudyard had given him.  It produced some strange, malignant effect on his mind.  Everything seemed to stop in him, and he was suddenly possessed by a spirit which carried him into that same region where Rudyard had been.  It was the region of the abnormal.  In it one moves in a dream, majestically unresponsive to all outward things, numb, unconcerned, disregarding all except one’s own agony, which seems to neutralize the universe and reduce all life’s problems to one formula of solution.

“What did you say to him that stopped him?” she asked in a whisper of awed and dreadful interest, as, after an earthquake, a survivor would speak in the stillness of dead and unburied millions.