Page:Malvina of Brittany - Jerome (1916).djvu/152

 Unless there had been that something that had not come out—something he had learnt later—that excused even that monstrous callousness of hers.

Yet what could there be? It had all been so planned, so cold-blooded. That shaving in the dining-room! It was that seemed most to stick in his throat. She must have brought him down a looking-glass; there was not one in the room. Why couldn't he have gone upstairs into the bathroom, where Hepworth always shaved himself, where he would have found everything to his hand?

He had been moving about the room, talking disjointedly as he paced, and suddenly he stopped and looked at me.

"Why in the dining-room?" he demanded of me.

He was jingling some keys in his pocket. It was a habit of his when cross-examining, and I felt as if somehow I knew; and, without thinking—so it seemed to me—I answered him.

"Perhaps," I said, "it was easier to bring a razor down than to carry a dead man up."

He leant with his arms across the table, his eyes glittering with excitement.