"No. Nevertheless, I thank you for your apparent good intent," answered Rosalind.
He was silent a little while, looking down at her. On her part, she did not move, and kept her eyes studiously averted.
"Then, for your sake, and to spite him, I accuse him to you of the murder!" he almost hissed.
"That is very wrong of you, very unlike an officer of the law. You know that he is quite innocent of it."
"Great, indeed, is your faith!" came the taunt. "Well, then," he added suddenly, "again for your sake, and again to spite him, I will even let you into a police secret. Hear it--listen to it--yesterday, with a search-warrant, I raided Mr. Osborne's private apartments. And this is what I found--at the bottom of a trunk a suit of clothes, the very clothes which the driver of the taxicab described as those of the man whom he took from Berkeley Street to Feldisham Mansions on the night of the murder. And those clothes, now in the possession of the police, are all speckled and spotted with blood. Come, Miss Marsh--what do you say now? Is your trust weakened?"
Furneaux's eyes sparkled with a glint of real hatred of Osborne, but Rosalind saw nothing of that. She rose, took an unsteady step or two, and stared through the window out into the street. Then she heard the door of the room being opened. She turned at once. Before a word could escape her lips, Furneaux was gone.
One minute later, she was scribbling with furious speed:
Do not read my letter. I will call for it--unopened--in person.
She tugged at the bell-rope. When Pauline appeared, she whispered: "Quickly, Pauline, for my sake--this telegram." And as Pauline ran with it, she sank into a chair, and sat there with closed eyelids and trembling lips, sorely stricken in her pride, yet even more sorely in her heart.
Now, if her letter had gone by the post by which she had sent it, Osborne would have read it two hours or more before the telegram arrived. But it had been kept back by Pauline: and, as it was, the letter only arrived five minutes before the telegram.
At that moment Osborne was upstairs in his house. The letter was handed to Hylda Prout in the library. She looked at it, and knew the writing, for she had found in Osborne's room at Tormouth a note of invitation to luncheon from Rosalind to Osborne, and did not scruple to steal it. A flood of jealousy now stabbed her heart and inflamed her eyes. It was then near five in the afternoon, and she had on a silver tripod a kettle simmering for tea, for she was a woman of fads, and held that the servants of the establishment brewed poison. She quickly steamed open the letter--which had been already steamed open by Pauline--and, every second expecting Osborne to enter, ran her eye through it. Then she pressed down the flap of the envelope anew.