She looked at him with a sudden spasm of alarm. “Colin, what do you mean?” she said. “He didn’t kill himself?” He liked producing that look of terror in her eyes: he liked playing with her fears. “Of course I haven’t told you what really happened,” he said, “for, as you know, I am always considerate and should hate to shock you. Perhaps I will tell you sometime. But suicide, no, it wasn’t suicide. There’s a little puzzle for you, Violet, to occupy your leisure, now that the duties of a hostess no longer take all your time. Vincenzo dies very suddenly one night, and Douglas finds he can’t breathe the same atmosphere as me next day.... Ah, I guess what you’re conjecturing, but it’s wrong. I wasn’t the cause, directly or indirectly, of Vincenzo’s death. What a mind you’ve got, darling, to let that suspicion ever peep into it!” Colin spoke with a soft deliberation: he was like a great purring cat with a mouse between his paws. “You did think that, you know,” he said, “just as you still think that I had, well, let’s say the tip of a finger in poor Pamela’s death. Altogether, I feel rather lonely and deserted this afternoon. Here are you, with dark suspicions about me, and then my old friend Douglas has gone, and my old servant (he was a friend, too) Vincenzo has gone, and then Dennis has gone, and all within twenty-four hours.” He put down his cup and sat down on the rug by her feet, clasping his knees. “And I find so little sympathy,” he said. “I believe you’re not sorry that Douglas and Vincenzo have gone, and I wonder, I really do wonder, whether you’re sorry that Dennis has gone.” There was a fiendish ingenuity. Violet suspected, at the bottom of this question. How well he divined her mind! How like him, as if he was some deft conjurer, to guess what was in it! “Why, I miss Dennis most awfully,” she said. “The house seems dead without him.” Colin smiled. “Yes, very pretty and Madonna-like,” he said. “But that wasn’t what I asked you. I asked you if you were sorry Dennis had gone. That’s a direct question enough: can’t you answer it directly?” She rose with all her nerves on edge. But that would never do. If she was to reach Colin at all, with the love that was the only efficient power she had, she must eradicate her fear of him, brushing aside all that she shuddered at, for that, cramped and clogged her movement towards him. “The question is direct enough,” she said, “but I can’t give you a direct answer. You’ve made the boy devoted to you, that’s beyond question, and sometimes I’ve been afraid, and wished he was not here. But then I’ve wondered whether I haven’t misjudged you altogether. Dennis is just as sweet and innocent as he has always been. And then I’ve asked myself whether you haven’t begun to love him.... Oh, Colin, if that’s only so! You know I would give my life for that.” Colin jumped to his feet.