“Enough of this folly,” exclaimed Von Steinberg, angrily, “don’t pretend to misunderstand me! You have altered in every respect! I have raised you to a position above that to which you were born, and your head has been unable to stand the elevation. You have become vain, haughty, arrogant, and insolent! Yet I could have borne all that and only cursed my own folly for it, but this crime--no! no! I can never live under the same roof with you again. We part to-night!” “That is as you please!” cried the Marchesa, shrilly, “it will leave me freer and more independent! I shall have more opportunities of seeing Signor Gueglielmo, and my other friends!” “No! by my faith you won’t!” exclaimed the Baron. “If the man ever enters this house after I am gone, I will drag you and him into the Divorce Court, and let my misery end there!” “That is to be seen,” remarked the Marchesa. “You defy me!” cried Von Steinberg, “_you_--who murdered my best friend! Yes! we need not mince words here, Madame la Marchesa, the time is past for that! Ricardo told me all--how you purchased the arsenic (which I was fool enough to believe the poor fellow had procured himself)--at the Hampstead chemist’s, under the pretence you wanted it for vermin--and how you mixed it with the whiskey and water which you persuaded him to drink because you said _I_ had ordered it! You think you are so secure that you can defy and insult me! What if I looked up that chemist and examined his books, and proved the date you bought the poison from him to be that of your husband’s death? What then, Madame la Marchesa?” He had sprung forward as he spoke, and approached her so nearly that the woman felt alarmed, but still her native insolence upheld her. “What then?” she echoed. “Why! I would force you to declare that you gained your information through Spiritualism, and make you the laughing-stock of London. How would Spiritualistic detectives accord with the English law, Baron von Steinberg, eh?” “But you would leave the Court with an indelible stain upon your character, and where would your friends be then?” “I should go to Signor Gueglielmo, and in his beautiful Italy I should soon forget that I had ever inhabited such a cold, gloomy, unsociable country as this!” “Signor Gueglielmo! You acknowledge he is your lover then?” “_One_ of them!” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. “Good Heavens! That I should have lived to hear you accuse yourself of such baseness! Are you a woman, or a devil? Are you yourself, Hannah, or does some evil spirit possess you, and obscure the humble virtues you once had?” “Do you think women are all fools?” she retorted, turning on him fiercely, “are you men to take your pleasures as you will, and we to be debarred from any? Why should I not have lovers. I am young and beautiful.” In saying these words, the Marchesa assumed such a coquettish air, that solemn though the occasion was, Von Steinberg almost laughed.