Wingarde glanced at her.

“You had better go and lie down till dinner,” he said.

Nina looked back at him.  Her lips quivered a little, but when she spoke her voice was absolutely steady.  She held her head resolutely high.

“I think Archie must have forgotten to thank you,” she said, “for what you did.  But I have not.  Will you accept my gratitude?”

There was proud humility in her voice.  But Wingarde only shrugged his shoulders with a sneer.

“Your gratitude would have been more genuine if you had been saved a widow instead of a wife,” he said brutally.

She recoiled from him.  Her eyes flashed furious indignation.  She felt as if he had struck her in the face.  She spoke instantly and vehemently.  Her voice shook.

“That is a poison of your own mixing,” she said.  “You know it!”

“What!  It isn’t true?” he asked.

He drew suddenly close to her.  His eyes gleamed also with the gleam of a smouldering fire.  She saw that he was moved.  She believed him to be angry.  Trembling, yet scornful, she held her peace.

He gripped her wrists suddenly, bending his dark face close to hers.

“If it isn’t true—­” he said, and stopped.

She drew back from him with a startled movement.  For an instant her eyes challenged his.  Then abruptly their fierce resistance failed.  She turned her face aside and burst into tears.

In a moment she was free.  Her husband stood regarding her with a very curious look in his eyes.  He watched her as she moved slowly away from him, fighting fiercely, desperately, to regain her self-control.  He saw her sit down, leaving almost the length of the room between them, and lean her head upon her hand.

Then the man’s arrested brutality suddenly reasserted itself, and he strode to the door.

“Pshaw!” he exclaimed as he went.  “Don’t I know that you pray for a deliverer every night of your life?  And what deliverer would you have if not death—­the surest of all—­in your case positively the only one within the bounds of possibility?”

He was gone with the words, but she would not have attempted to answer them had he stayed.  Her head was bowed almost to her knees, and she sat quite motionless, as if he had stabbed her to the heart.

Later she dined alone with Archie in her husband’s unexplained absence, and later still, at the theatre, her face was as gay, her laugh as frequent, as any there.

IX

THE END OF A MYSTERY

On the following afternoon Nina went to the Wade Home to see the victim of the accident.  She was received by the matron, a middle-aged, kindly woman, who was openly pleased with the concern her visitor exhibited.