’A terrible accident —­ a blow that happened to —­ I couldn’t believe it till the doctor came and said he was dead.’

‘But tell me more.  What led to it?  How could you strike Mr. Redgrave?’

Sibyl had all at once subdued her voice to an excessive calmness.  Her hands were trembling; she folded them again upon her lap.  Every line of her face, every muscle of her body, declared the constraint in which she held herself.  This, said Hugh inwardly, was no more than he had expected; disaster made noble proof of Sibyl’s strength.

‘I’ll tell you from the beginning.’

He recounted faithfully the incidents at Waterloo Station, and the beginning of Mrs. Maskell’s narrative in the cab.  At the disclosure of her relations with Redgrave, he was interrupted by a short, hard laugh.

’I couldn’t help it, Hugh.  That woman! —­ why, you have always said you were sure to meet her somewhere.  Housekeeper at Mr. Redgrave’s!  We know what the end of that would be!’

Sibyl talked rapidly, in an excited chatter —­ the kind of utterance never heard upon her lips.

‘It was strange,’ Hugh continued.  ’Seems to have been mere chance.  Then she began to say that she had learnt some of Redgrave’s secrets —­ about people who came and went mysteriously.  And then —­ Sibyl, I can’t speak the words.  It was the foulest slander that she could have invented.  She meant to drive me mad, and she succeeded —­ curse her!’

Drops of anguish stood upon his forehead.  He sprang up and crossed the room.  Turning again, he saw his wife gazing at him, as if in utmost perplexity.

’Hugh, I don’t in the least understand you.  What was the slander?  Perhaps lam stupid —­ but ——­’

He came near, but could not look her in the eyes.

‘My dearest’ —­ his voice shook —­ ’it was an infamous lie about you —­ that you had been there ——­’

‘Why, of course I have!  You know that I have.’

’She meant more than that.  She said you had been there secretly —­ at night ——­’

Hugh Carnaby —­ the man who had lived as high-blooded men do live, who had laughed by the camp-fire or in the club smoking-room at many a Rabelaisian story and capped it with another, who hated mock modesty, was all for honest openness between man and woman —­ stood in guilty embarrassment before his own wife’s face of innocence.  It would have been a sheer impossibility for him to ask her where and how she spent a certain evening last winter; Sibyl, now as ever, was his ideal of chaste womanhood.  He scorned himself for what he had yet to tell.

Sibyl was gazing at him, steadily, inquiringly.

‘She made you believe this?’ fell upon the silence, in her softest, clearest tones.

’No!  She couldn’t make me believe it.  But the artful devil had such a way of talking ——­’

’I understand.  You didn’t know whether to believe or not.  Just tell me, please, what proof she offered you.’