Lieutenant Valcour felt that there was a catch in it somewhere. If she held Endicott’s condition in the light of a tragedy then she scarcely regarded his death as an act of vengeance on the part of her unquestionably inflexible god.
“Tragedy?” he repeated softly.
“A tragedy, sir, for blinded eyes.”
He hoped that she wasn’t going to be allegorical. He endeavoured to interpret. “It is hard on Mrs. Endicott,” he said.
For a moment he thought she was going to melt. “That poor young thing,” she said, and her voice fringed on unaccustomed softnesses. “That sweet young child of beauty—what a bitter ending for the journey of her tormented heart.”
He stepped delicately out upon the fragile ice. “But she’s really better off, don’t you think?”
“She will never know to the full the fortune of her release.” Mrs. Siddons’s incredibly thin body was suddenly shaken with passion as she added, “From that hateful—that filthy beast.”
“Oh, come, Mrs. Siddons—no man is quite as bad as all that.”
Her eyes blazed with the heat of a strange malevolence. “You didn’t know him, Lieutenant, as we did.”
“ ‘We,’ Mrs. Siddons?”
“Myself, sir, and the servants under my charge.”
“You found him disagreeable—overbearing?”
Mrs. Siddons stared fixedly at the coals, as if finding in their vibrant reds some adequate illustration of her angered thoughts. “I found him such a