He made a curt gesture of repudiation. "I suspected--perhaps. I actually
knew--nothing."

"I see," she said, with a faint smile. "She just slipped through--and
you looked the other way."

"Nothing of the sort!" he said sternly. "I did my utmost--as I have
always done my utmost--to prolong life. It is my duty--the first
principle of my profession; and I hold it--I always have held it--as
sacred."

"And yet--you let Violet's go," she said.

He swung round almost violently and turned his back. "I will not discuss
that point any further," he said.

She looked at him with an odd dispassionateness. She still seemed to be
searching the distant past. "You never liked her," she said at last
slowly. "And she was horribly afraid of you--afraid of you!" A sudden
tremor of awakening life ran through the words. The stunned look began
to pass. Again the horror looked out of her eyes. "She was so afraid of
you that--when she went mad--she tried to kill you. Ah, I see now!" She
caught her breath sharply--"You--you were afraid too!"

He remained with his back turned upon her, motionless as a statue.

"And so--and so--" Her eyes came swiftly back to the present and saw him
only. The horror in them had become vivid, anguished. She rose and
stretched an accusing finger towards him. "That was why you ended her
life!" she said. "It was--to save--your own!"

He wheeled round at that and faced her with that in his eyes which she
had never before seen there--a look that sent the blood to her heart.
"By Heaven, Olga," he said, "you go--rather far!"

He came towards her slowly. There was something terrible about him at
that moment, something that held her fettered and dumb before him,
though--so great was her horror--she would have given all she had to
turn and flee.

He halted before her, looking down into her face with a curious
intentness. "You really believe that?" he said. "You can't conceive such
a thing as this--utterly and inexcusably wrong as I admit it to be--you
can't conceive it to have been done from a motive of mercy?"

She shrank away from him as from a thing unclean. The impulse to escape
was still strong upon her, urging her to a wild resistance. She met the
pitiless eyes that watched her like a creature at bay. "You never did
anything in mercy yet!" she said. "There is no mercy in you!"

"Indeed!" he said, and uttered a brief, grating laugh that made her
shudder. "In that case, I'm afraid I can't help you any furthe