motive was trying to
learn the trick of the lock in Noumea, France's farthest prison. For
a moment they looked at each other steadily, then she said: "That
portrait--let me see it."

The hand that she held out was unsteady, and it looked strangely white
and cold. He drew the photograph from his pocket and handed it to her. A
flush passed across her face as she looked at it, and was followed by a
marked paleness. She gazed at the portrait for a moment, then her lips
parted and a great sigh broke from her. She was about to hand it back
to him, but an inspiration seemed to seize her, and she threw it on the
floor and put her heel upon it. "That is the way I treated him," she
said, and she ground her heel into the face of the portrait. Then she
took her foot away. "See, see," she cried, "how his face is scarred and
torn! I did that. Do you know what it is to torture one who loves you?
No, you do not. You begin with shame and regret. But the sight of your
lover's agonies, his indignation, his anger, madden you and you get the
lust of cruelty. You become insane. You make new wounds. You tear
open old ones. You cut, you thrust, you bruise, you put acid in the
sores--the sharpest nitric acid; and then you heal with a kiss of
remorse, and that is acid too--carbolic acid, and it smells of death.
They put it in the room where dead people are. Have you ever been to the
Morgue in Paris? They use it there."

She took up the portrait. "Look," she said, "how his face is torn! Tell
me of him."

"First, who are you?"

She steadied herself. "Who are you?" she asked.

"I am his friend, Blake Shorland."

"Yes, I remember your name." She threw her hands up with a laugh, a
bitter hopeless laugh. Her eyes half closed, so that only light
came from them, no colour. The head was thrown back with a defiant
recklessness, and then she said: "I was Lucile Laroche, his wife--Luke
Freeman's wife."

"But his wife died. He identified her in the Morgue."

"I do not know why I speak to you so, but I feel that the time has come
to tell all to you. That was not his wife in the Morgue. It was his
wife's sister, my sister whom my brother drowned for her money--he made
her life such a misery! And he did not try to save her when he knew she
meant to drown herself. She was not bad; she was a thousand times better
than I am, a million times better than he was. He was a devil. But he
is dead now too.... She was taken to the Morgue. She looked like me
alt