Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/191

 voice, too, was trembling. For a moment she sat silent, while Jill, motionless, gazed at her. Then she said, and her voice was firm again: 'It is this. My mother was a murderess.'

Jill, transfixed, gazed upon her.

'She killed my father,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, not raising her eyes from her knotted hands. 'It was what is called a crime passionnel. He loved another woman and she killed him and tried to kill herself.'

Jill sat and gazed upon the black, resolute figure; the pale, fixed face. As the meaning of the knife-like words came fully to her understanding, she saw that Mademoiselle Ludérac had come to cut herself away; to set herself apart again. It was severance she had come to ensure. And it was true that the sense of awe that descended upon Jill had in it an abyss-like element; as though the gulf of suffering revealed in the words did indeed divide them.

'Madame de Lamouderie told me that your mother was mad,' she said. This was all that she could find to say at first.

'I asked her what she had told you. It was kind of her to say no more; very kind,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac.

'She was so dreadfully sorry, of course. But I wish she could have told me everything. It would have spared you this,' said Jill. 'When you asked her, she could have told you that I knew. Then you need never have spoken about it, unless you felt you wanted to.'

At this Mademoiselle Ludérac sat silent, looking