In Billy's studio we had been positively straining at one another to speak; since then, free any time this last half-hour to say what we would, we had hung just as desperately back; but now came a sudden enough end both to straining and to reluctance. She turned to me; my eyes would have fallen before the gaze she gave me, but were compelled to endure it; and the lightning is not more instantaneous and direct than were the words that now burst from her. "Tell me--you killed that boy, didn't you?" I said you should have it soon. It has been a little longer than I thought. At any rate you have it now. The remaining events of that evening are easier to set down than to account for. My difficulty perhaps is that I am trying to tell an extraordinary thing in terms that are inappropriately plain. Nothing, for example, would be simpler than to say how we stopped in our walk, presently resumed it, slowly passed the Palace and the Royal Mews, and in course of time found ourselves walking up Grosvenor Place. It is true that we did these things, but it is also true that they are all more or less beside the mark. I need not urge my point, how beside the mark they are, by comparison with the remarkable results of being asked by a woman whom you have known only slightly and whom you have almost forgotten all about whether you have killed a certain young man. Therefore if, as may very well be the case, you yourself have no experience on such a point, that is all the more reason why you should trust me to give, in my own way, the essence of an hour without parallel in my experience, and, I imagine, to be matched in that of few others. As she had spoken I had stepped back, without haste, a pace from her, taking her umbrella with me. I was stepping back another pace, when my back encountered the iron railings, stopping me. Until then her hand had not left my sleeve. Now perhaps three yards separated us, she standing in the rain, I with her gimcrack of an umbrella. There was a lamp not far away; the veil of falling rain held and diffused the light of it, so that I actually saw her with more evenness of detail than I should have done had she stood directly in the light, one side of her face illumined, and the other dark; and probably my own face was not entirely lost in the shadow of the umbrella. Our eyes had met again, exactly as they had met in the studio.... On her soft floppy hat and over the shoulders of her three-quarters grey coat I saw the rime of fine rain gather. It became a sort of soft moss of rain, that gave her figure a faintly discerned outline of light. Though her wrists were damp and dark, and her skirts straight and heavy, I still did not think of passing her the umbrella; it is wonderful how many small things escape you when you have just been asked whether you have put an end to a young man's life. The rain came on still more sharply. I saw it gleam on the backs of her kid gloves....