“Stella!” He let her go so suddenly that she nearly fell.  The utterance of her name was as a cry wrung from him by sheer agony.  He turned from her with his hands over his face.  “My God!” he said, and again almost inarticulately, “My—­God!”

The low utterance pierced her, yet she stood motionless, her hands gripped hard together.  He had forced the words from her, and they were past recall.  Nor would she have recalled them, had she been able, for it seemed to her that her love had become an evil thing, and her whole being shrank from it in a species of horrified abhorrence, even though she could not cast it out.

He had turned towards the window, and she watched him, her heart beating in slow, hard strokes with a sound like a distant drum.  Would he go?  Would he remain?  She almost prayed aloud that he would go.

But he did not.  Very suddenly he turned and strode back to her.  There was purpose in every line of him, but there was no longer any violence.

He halted before her.  “Stella,” he said, and his voice was perfectly steady and controlled, “do you think you are being altogether fair to me?”

She wrung her clasped hands.  She could not answer him.

He took them into his own very quietly.  “Just look me in the face for a minute!” he said.

She yearned to disobey, but she could not.  Dumbly she raised her eyes to his.

He waited a moment, very still and composed.  Then he spoke.  “Stella, I swear to you—­and I call God to witness—­that I did not kill Ralph Dacre.”

A dreadful shiver went through her at the bald brief words.  She felt, as Tommy had felt a little earlier, physically sick.  The beating of her heart was getting slower and slower.  She wondered if presently it would stop.

“Do you believe me?” he said, still holding her eyes with his, still clasping her icy hands firmly between his own.

She forced herself to speak before that horrible sense of nausea overcame her.  “Perhaps—­David—­said the same thing—­about Uriah the Hittite.”

His face changed a little, but it was a change she could not have defined.  His eyes remained inscrutably fixed upon hers.  They seemed to enchain her quivering soul.

“No,” he said quietly.  “Nor did I employ any one else to do it.”

“But you were there!” The words seemed suddenly to burst from her without her own volition.

He drew back sharply, as if he had been struck.  But he kept his eyes upon hers.  “I can’t explain anything,” he said.  “I am not here to explain.  I only came to see if your love was great enough to make you believe in me—­in spite of all there seems to be against me.  Is it, Stella?  Is it?”

His words seemed to go through her, tearing a way to her heart; the agony was more than she could bear.  She uttered an anguished cry, and wrenched herself from him.  “It isn’t a question of love!” she said.  “You know it isn’t a question of love!  I never wanted to love you.  I never wholly trusted you.  But you forced my love—­though you couldn’t compel my trust.  And now that I know—­now that I know—­” her voice broke as if the torture were too great for her; she flung out her hands with a gesture of driving him from her—­“oh, it is hell on earth—­hell on earth!”