"Do not think I blame you! I know—I know. It is my own cowardice, my own baseness of soul that has brought it all upon me. And now it is too late. His papers, his letters, too late they came to me. I am lost—lost!" She put her hands to her forehead, and reeled. He caught her in his arms. Those dashed papers! How obstinate she had been about them! He had known it would be too much for her; he had even been ready to take the burden upon himself. "There, there, Rosamond!" She faintly struggled against his supporting embrace, every inch of her flesh shuddering from his touch. Oh, that voice from the past: "_There are things a man cannot contemplate in his living body; things the flesh rebels against. The dead will be quiet._" The dead ... but he was not dead. Perhaps now he was looking on them! The horror of the thought paralysed her, as the snake paralyses the bird. Yet, if she had had a knife in her hand she might, in that madness of nausea, have struck it into the breast against which she was clasped. "Sir James was certainly right," thought Sir Arthur, tightening his grip upon her waist with one hand, while he patted her shrinking shoulder with the other. "What Rosamond wants, poor girl, is soothing." She wrenched herself free suddenly, with unexpected strength. Sir Arthur staggered. Then she turned upon him a countenance of such livid vindictive menace and at the same time such torture that, speechless, he recoiled before her. At the door he muttered something about sending up Aspasia; but it was closed upon him and locked before the words were formulated. He listened awhile. From within came, at first, a faint swish as of her moving draperies, and then a heavy silence. "She looked at me," said the unhappy husband to himself; "she looked at me as if she could murder me!" He shook his head, and began once more to concoct his telegram as he slowly walked downstairs. *CHAPTER XIX*