She pressed her hands to her breast, struggled for her breath for a moment, then: “Ohhh! . . . You buried him! . . . What sort of man are you? . . . You dared not tell! . . . He is another of your victims? . . . You dared not confess that evening. . . . You must have killed him. What could he have done to you? . . . You fastened on him some atrocious quarrel and . . .” Her vengeful aspect, her poignant cries left him as unmoved as the weary rock against which he leaned. He only raised his eyelids to look at her and lowered them slowly. Nothing more. It silenced her. And as if ashamed she made a gesture with her hand, putting away from her that thought. He spoke, quietly ironic at first. “Ha! the legendary Renouard of sensitive idiots—the ruthless adventurer—the ogre with a future. That was a parrot cry, Miss Moorsom. I don’t think that the greatest fool of them all ever dared hint such a stupid thing of me that I killed men for nothing. No, I had noticed this man in a hotel. He had come from up country I was told, and was doing nothing. I saw him sitting there lonely in a corner like a sick crow, and I went over one evening to talk to him. Just on impulse. He wasn’t impressive. He was pitiful. My worst enemy could have told you he wasn’t good enough to be one of Renouard’s victims. It didn’t take me long to judge that he was drugging himself. Not drinking. Drugs.” “Ah! It’s now that you are trying to murder him,” she cried. “Really. Always the Renouard of shopkeepers’ legend. Listen! I would never have been jealous of him. And yet I am jealous of the air you breathe, of the soil you tread on, of the world that sees you—moving free—not mine. But never mind. I rather liked him. For a certain reason I proposed he should come to be my assistant here. He said he believed this would save him. It did not save him from death. It came to him as it were from nothing—just a fall. A mere slip and tumble of ten feet into a ravine. But it seems he had been hurt before up-country—by a horse. He ailed and ailed. No, he was not a steel-tipped man. And his poor soul seemed to have been damaged too. It gave way very soon.” “This is tragic!” Felicia Moorsom whispered with feeling. Renouard’s lips twitched, but his level voice continued mercilessly. “That’s the story. He rallied a little one night and said he wanted to tell me something. I, being a gentleman, he said, he could confide in me. I told him that he was mistaken. That there was a good deal of a plebeian in me, that he couldn’t know. He seemed disappointed. He muttered something about his innocence and something that sounded like a curse on some woman, then turned to the wall and—just grew cold.” “On a woman,” cried Miss Moorsom indignantly. “What woman?”