ure humbug; there isn't any such place.'

'Lord, what a deceiver!' said Lyon.

'Is there any one else you suspect?' the Colonel went on.

'Not a creature.'

'And what do your servants say?'

'They say it wasn't _them_, and I reply that I never said it was. That's
about the substance of our conferences.'

'And when did they discover the havoc?'

'They never discovered it at all. I noticed it first--when I came back.'

'Well, she could easily have stepped in,' said the Colonel. 'Don't you
remember how she turned up that day, like the clown in the ring?'

'Yes, yes; she could have done the job in three seconds, except that the
picture wasn't out.'

'My dear fellow, don't curse me!--but of course I dragged it out.'

'You didn't put it back?' Lyon asked tragically.

'Ah, Clement, Clement, didn't I tell you to?' Mrs. Capadose exclaimed in
a tone of exquisite reproach.

The Colonel groaned, dramatically; he covered his face with his hands.
His wife's words were for Lyon the finishing touch; they made his whole
vision crumble--his theory that she had secretly kept herself true. Even
to her old lover she wouldn't be so! He was sick; he couldn't eat; he
knew that he looked very strange. He murmured something about it being
useless to cry over spilled milk--he tried to turn the conversation to
other things. But it was a horrid effort and he wondered whether they
felt it as much as he. He wondered all sorts of things: whether they
guessed he disbelieved them (that he had seen them of course they would
never guess); whether they had arranged their story in advance or it was
only an inspiration of the moment; whether she had resisted, protested,
when the Colonel proposed it to her, and then had been borne down by
him; whether in short she didn't loathe herself as she sat there. The
cruelty, the cowardice of fastening their unholy act upon the wretched
woman struck him as monstrous--no less monstrous indeed than the levity
that could make them run the risk of her giving them, in her righteous
indignation, the lie. Of course that risk could only exculpate her and
not inculpate them--the probabilities protected them so perfectly; and
what the Colonel counted on (what he would have counted upon the day he
delivered himself, after first seeing her, at the studio, if he had
thought about the matter then at all and not spoken from the pure
spontaneity of his genius) was simply that Miss Geraldine had really
vanished for ever