Oh, but to lie through those terrible small hours, her brain feverishly active, compelling her to live again in the scenes and the emotions she most desired to forget!  She was haunted by the voice of Cyrus Redgrave, which at times grew so distinct to her hearing that it became an hallucination.  Her memory reproduced his talk with astonishing fidelity; it was as though she had learnt it by heart, instead of merely listening to it at the time.  This only in the silence of night; during the day she could not possibly have recalled a tenth of what her brain thus treacherously preserved.

In sleep she sometimes dreamt of him, and that was perhaps worse; for whilst the waking illusion only reproduced what he had actually said, with all his tricks of tone, his suavities of expression, sleep brought before her another Redgrave.  He looked at her with a smile, indeed, but a smile of such unutterable malignity that she froze with terror.  It was always the same.  Redgrave stood before her smiling, silent; stood and gazed until in a paroxysm of anguish she cried out and broke the dream.  Once, whilst the agony was upon her, she sprang from bed, meaning to go to her husband and tell him everything, and so, it might be, put an end to her sufferings.  But with her hand upon the door she lost courage.  Impossible!  She could not hope to be believed.  She could never convince her husband that she had told him all.

Upon her lay the guilt of Redgrave’s death.  This had entered slowly into her consciousness; at first rejected, but ever returning until the last argument of self-solace gave way.  But for her visit to the bungalow that evening, Hugh Carnaby would not have been maddened to the point of fatal violence.  In the obscurity he had mistaken her figure for that of Sibyl; and when Redgrave guarded her retreat, he paid for the impulse with his life.

On the Sunday before her concert, she had thought of going to see Redgrave, but the risk seemed too great, and there was no certainty of finding him at home.  She wished above all things to see him, for there was a suspicion in her mind that Mrs. Strangeways had a plot against her, though of its nature she could form no idea.  It might be true that Redgrave was purposely holding aloof, whether out of real jealousy, or simply as a stratagem, a new move in the game.  She would not write to him; she knew the danger of letters, and had been careful never to write him even the simplest note.  If she must remain in uncertainty about his attitude towards her, the approaching ordeal would be intensified with a new agitation:  was he coming to her recital, or was he not?  She had counted upon triumphing before him.  If he could stay away, her power over him was incomplete, and at the moment when she had meant it to be irresistible.