"
"I didn't kill him! I didn't, I didn't!" Cuckoo cried out, shrilly,
half rising from the sofa. A wild suspicion suddenly came over her that
Valentine was pursuing her as an avenger of blood, under the mistaken
idea that she had done Marr to death in the night.
"Hush! I know that. He died naturally, as a doctor would say, and he has
been buried; and by now probably he is a shell that can only contain the
darkness of his grave. Yet, for all that, he's not done with, Miss
Bright."
"He is! he is!" she persisted.
The mention of Marr always woke terror in her. She sat, her eyes fixed
on Valentine, her memory fixed on Marr. Perhaps for this reason what her
memory saw and what her eyes saw seemed gradually to float together,
and fuse and mingle, till eyes and memory mingled, too, into one sense,
observant of one being only, neither wholly Marr nor wholly Valentine,
but both in one. She had linked them together vaguely before, but never
as now. Yet even now the clouds were floating round her and the vapours.
She might think she saw, but she could not understand, and what she saw
was rather a phantom standing in a land of mirage than a man standing
in the world of men.
"Some day, perhaps, I will prove to you that he is not," Valentine said.
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