"
"Leam!" cried Edgar, "how can you talk such nonsense? The thing is
growing beyond a joke. Unsay your words; they are a wrong done to _me_."
He had started to his feet while he spoke, and now stood before her
with a strangely scared and startled face. Naturally, as such a man
would, he was resolute not to accept such a terrible confession, and one
so unlikely, so impossible; but something in the girl's voice and
manner, something in its sad, still reality, seemed to overpower his
determination to find this simply a bad joke which she was playing off
on his credulity. And then the thing fitted only too well. He had heard
half a dozen times of Madame de Montfort's sudden death, and how very
strange it was that the draught which she had taken so often with
impunity before should have been found so laden with prussic acid on the
first night of her homecoming as to kill her in an instant--how strange,
too, that not the strictest search or inquiry could come upon a trace of
such poison bought or possessed by any member of the family, for what
police-officer would look to find a sixty-minim bottle of prussic acid
concealed among the coils of a young girl's hair? And when Leam said in
that quiet if desperate manner that it was she who had killed madame,
her words made the whole mystery clear and solved the as yet unsolved
problem.
Nevertheless, he would not believe her, but said again, passionately,
"Unsay your words, Leam: they offend me.
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