"I will leave when I feel like it, and not a single minute before, and you might just as well understand as much. You _have_ been living off my money. Oh, you needn't go to the trouble of lying. And she did too. And she hated me, she always hated me, because I had been fool enough to marry you, and she carried on like a lunatic more than half the time, and I always pretended not to notice it, and this is my reward for trying to behave like a lady." Patricia tossed her head. "Yes, and you needn't look at me as if I were some sort of a bug you hadn't ever seen before and didn't approve of, because I've seen you try that high-and-mighty trick too often for it to work with me." Patricia stood now beneath the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave. She had insisted, long ago, that it be hung in her own bedroom--"because it was through that beautiful boy we first got really acquainted, Olaf." The boy smiles at you from the canvas, smiles ambiguously, as the colonel now noted. "I think you had better go," said Colonel Musgrave. "Please go, Patricia, before I murder you." She saw that he was speaking in perfect earnest. IX Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had declined to speak with innumerable sympathetic cousins--Vartreys and Fentons and Allardyces and Musgraves, to the fifth and sixth remove--who had come from all quarters, with visiting-cards and low-voiced requests to be informed "if there is anything we can possibly do." Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had not any strength for anger now, and hardly for grief, Agatha had been his charge; and the fact that he had never plucked up courage to allude to her practises was now an enormity in which he could not quite believe. His cowardice and its fruitage confronted him, and frightened him into a panic frenzy of remorse. Agatha had been his charge; and he had entrusted the stewardship to Patricia. Between them--that Patricia might have her card-game, that he might sit upon a platform for an hour or two with a half-dozen other pompous fools--they had let Agatha die. There was no mercy in him for Patricia or for himself. He wished Patricia had been a man. Had any man --an emperor or a coal-heaver, it would not have mattered--spoken as Patricia had done within the moment, here, within arm's reach of the poor flesh that had been Agatha's, Rudolph Musgrave would have known his duty. But, according to his code, it was not permitted to be discourteous to a woman.... He caught himself with grotesque meanness wishing that Agatha had been there,--privileged by her sex where he was fettered,--she who was so generous of heart and so fiery of tongue at need; and comprehension that Agatha would never abet or adore him any more smote him anew. * * * * *