too modest for an ordinary lover's comfort, needing
to be tamed out of her savage bashfulness, not to be reproved for
transgressing the proper reticence of an English maid. It was a pretty
play, but it was only a play.

"Come and sit by me and make full confession, my darling," he said
lovingly.

"I will stand where I am. You sit," said Leam, without looking at him.

He seated himself on the sofa. "And now what has my little culprit to
say for herself?" he asked pleasantly, putting on a playful magisterial
air.

"It is over," said Leam, her hands pressed in each other with so tight a
clasp that the strained knuckles were white and started. "You must not
love me: I cannot be your wife."

"Why?" He showed his square white teeth beneath the golden sweep of his
moustache, his moist red lips parted, always smiling.

"I have done a great crime," said Leam in a low, monotonous voice.

"A crime! That is a large word for a small peccadillo--larger than any
sin of yours merits, my sweetheart."

"You do not know," said Leam with a despairing gesture. "How can you
know when you have not heard?"

"Well, what may be its name?" he asked, willing to humor her.

She paused for a moment: then with a visible effort, drawing in her
breath, she said, in a voice that was unnaturally calm and low, "I
killed madame."

"Leam!" cried Edgar, "how can you talk such nonsense? The thing is
growing beyond a joke. Unsay your words; they are a wrong done to _me_."

He had started to his feet while he spoke, and now stood before her
with a strangely scared and startled face. Naturally, as such a man
would, he was resolute not to accept such a terrible confession, and one
so unlikely, so impossible; but something in the girl's voice and
manner, something in its sad, still reality, seemed to overpower his
determination to find this simply a bad joke which she was playing off
on his credulity. And then the thing fitted only too well. He had heard
half a dozen times of Madame de Montfort's sudden death, and how very
strange it was that the draught which she had taken so often with
impunity before should have been found so laden with prussic acid on the
first night of her homecoming as to kill her in an instant--how strange,
too, that not the strictest search or inquiry could come upon a trace of
such poison bought or possessed by any member of the family, for what
police-officer would look to find a sixty-minim bottle of prussic acid
conceale