"You know what I mean. Did you not know when you came back to this house that I had fathomed your mystery--that I knew whose hand killed Angus Hamleigh. You did know it, Leonard: you must have known: for you knew that I was not a woman to fling a wife's duty to the winds, without some all-sufficient reason. You knew what kind of wife I had been for four dull, peaceful years--how honestly I had endeavoured to perform the duty which I took upon myself in loving gratitude to your dear mother. Did you believe that I could change all at once--become a heartless, empty-headed lover of pleasure--hold you, my husband, at arm's length--outrage propriety--defy opinion--without a motive so powerful, a purpose so deadly and so dear, that self-abasement, loss of good name, counted for nothing with me." "You are a fool," said Leonard, doggedly. "No one at the inquest so much as hinted at foul play. Why should _you_ suspect any one?" "For more than one good reason. First, your manner on the night before Angus Hamleigh's death--the words you and he spoke to each other at the door of his room. I asked you then if there were any quarrel between you, and you said no: but even then I did not believe you." "There was not much love between us. You did not expect that, did you?" asked her husband savagely. "You invited him to your house; you treated him as your friend. You had no cause to distrust him or me. You must have known that." "I knew that you loved him." "I had been your faithful and obedient wife." "Faithful and obedient; yes--a man might buy faith and obedience in any market. I knew that other man was master of your heart. Great Heaven, can I forget how I saw you that night, hanging upon his words, all your soul in your eyes." "We were talking of life and death. It was not his words that thrilled me; but the deep thoughts they stirred within me--thoughts of the great mystery--the life beyond the veil. Do you know what it is to speculate upon the life beyond this life, when you are talking to a man who bears the stamp of death upon his brow, who is as surely devoted to the grave as Socrates was when he talked to his friends in the prison. But why do I talk to you of these things? You cannot understand----" "No! I am outside the pale, am I not?" sneered Leonard; "made of a different clay from that sickly sentimental worshipper of yours, who turned to you when he had worn himself out in the worship of ballet-girls. I was not half fine enough for you, could not talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Was it a pleasant sensation for me, do you think, to see you two sentimentalizing and poetizing, day after day--Beethoven here and Byron there, and all the train of maudlin modern versifiers who have made it their chief business to sap the foundations of domestic life." "Why did you bring him into your house?"