Kitty made her way to her own room, and was not surprised to find that in a few moments Hugo followed her thither. She was sitting in a low chair, striving to command her agitated thoughts, and school herself into some semblance of tranquility, when he entered. She fully expected that he would try again to force from her the history of her interview with Vivian, but he did nothing of the kind. He threw himself into a chair opposite to her, and looked at her in silence, while she tried her best not to see his face at all. Those long, lustrous eyes, that low brow and perfectly-modelled mouth and chin, had grown hideous in her sight.

But when he spoke he took her completely by surprise.

"You had better begin to pack up your things," he said. "We shall go to the South of France either this week or next."

"And leave Mrs. Luttrell?" breathed Kitty.

His lips stretched themselves into something meant for a smile, but it was a very joyless smile.

"And leave Mrs. Luttrell," he repeated.

"But, Hugo, what will people say?"

"They won't find fault," he answered. "The matter will be simple enough when the time comes. Pack your boxes, and leave the rest to me."

"She is much better, certainly," hesitated Kitty, "but I do not like leaving her to servants."

"She is no better," said Hugo, rising, and turning a malevolent look upon her. "She is worse. Don't let me hear you say again that she is better. She is dying."

With these words he left the room. Kitty leaned back in her chair, for she was seized with a fit of trembling that made her unable to rise or speak. Something in the tone of Hugo's speech had frightened her. She was unreasonably suspicious, perhaps, but she had developed a great fear of Hugo's evil designs. He had shown her plainly enough that he had no principle, no conscience, no sense of shame. And she feared for Mrs. Luttrell.

Her fears did not go very far. She thought that Hugo was capable of sending away the nurse, or of depriving Mrs. Luttrell of care and comfort to such an extent as to shorten her life. She could not suspect Hugo of an intention to commit actual, flagrant crime. Yet some undefined terror of him had made her beg Vivian to tell Brian and his wife to come home as soon as possible. She did not know what might happen. She was afraid; and at any rate she wanted to secure her husband against temptation. He might thank her for it afterwards, perhaps, though Kitty did not think that he ever would.

She went upstairs after dinner to sit with Mrs. Luttrell, as she usually did at that hour. The poor woman was perceptibly better. The look of recognition in her eyes was not so painfully beseeching as it had been hitherto; the hand which Kitty took in hers gently returned her pressure. She muttered the only word that her lips seemed able to speak:—"Brian! Brian!"

"He is coming," said Kitty, bending her head so that her lips almost touched the withered cheek. "He is coming—coming soon."

A wonderful light of satisfaction stole into the melancholy eyes. Again she pressed Kitty's hand. She was content.

The nurse generally returned to Mrs. Luttrell's room after her supper; and Kitty waited for some time, wondering why she was so long in coming. She rang the bell at last and enquired for her. The maid replied that Mrs. Samson, the nurse, had been taken ill and had gone to bed. Kitty then asked for the housekeeper, and the maid went away to summon her.

Again Kitty waited; but no housekeeper came.

She was about to ring the bell a second time, when her husband entered the room. "What do you want with the housekeeper at this time of night?" he asked, carelessly.

Kitty explained. Hugo raised his eyebrows. "Oh, is that all?" he said. "Really, Kitty, you make too much fuss about my aunt. She will do well enough. I won't have poor old Shairp called up from her bed to sit here till morning."

"But somebody must stay," said Kitty, whom her husband had drawn into the little dressing-room. "Mrs. Luttrell must not be left alone."

"She shall not be left alone, my dear; I'll take care of that. I have seen Samson, hearing that she was ill, and find that it is only a fit of sickness, which is passing off. She will be here in half-an-hour; or, if not, Shairp can be called."

"Then I will stay here until one of them comes," said Kitty.

"You will do nothing of the kind. You will go to bed at once. It is ten o'clock, and I don't want you to spoil that charming complexion of yours by late hours." He spoke with a sort of sneer, but immediately passed his finger down her delicate cheek with a tenderly caressing gesture, as if to make up for the previous hardness of his tone. Kitty shrank away from him, but he only smiled and continued softly: "Those pretty eyes must not be dimmed by want of sleep. Go to bed, ma belle, and dream of me."

"Let me stay for a little while," entreated Kitty. "If Mrs. Samson comes in half-an-hour I shall not be tired. Just till then, Hugo."

"Not at all, my little darling." His tone was growing quite playful, and he even imprinted a light kiss upon her cheek as he went on. "I will wait here myself until Samson comes, and if she is not better I will summon Mrs. Shairp. Will that not satisfy you?"

"Why should you stay?" said Kitty, in a whisper. A look of dread had come into her eyes.

"Why should I not?" smiled Hugo. "Aunt Margaret likes to have me with her, and she is not likely to want anything just now. Run away, my fair Kitty. I will call you if I really need help."

What did Kitty suspect? She turned white and suddenly put her arms round her husband's neck, bringing his beautiful dark face down to her own.

"Let me stay," she murmured in his ear. "I am afraid. I don't know exactly what I am afraid of; but I want to stay. I can't leave her to-night."

He put her away from him almost roughly. A sinister look crossed his face.

"You are a little fool: you always were," he said; fiercely. Then he tried to regain the old smoothness of tongue which so seldom failed him; but this time he found it difficult. "You are nervous," he said. "You have been sitting in a sick-room too long: I must not let you over-tire yourself. You will be better when we leave Netherglen. Go and dream of blue skies and sunny shores: we will see my native land together, Kitty, and forget this desert of a place. There, go now. I will take care of Aunt Margaret."

He put her out at the door, still with the silky, caressing manner that she distrusted, still with the false smile stereotyped upon his face. Then he went back into the dressing-room and closed the door.

Kitty went to her own room, and changed her evening dress for a dressing-gown of soft, dark red cashmere which did not rustle as she moved. She was resolved against going to bed, at any rate until Hugo had left Mrs. Luttrell's room. She sat down and waited.

The clock struck eleven. She could bear the suspense no longer. She went out into the passage and listened at the door of Mrs. Luttrell's room. Not a sound: not a movement to be heard.

She stole away to the room which the nurse occupied. Mrs. Samson was lying on her bed, breathing heavily: she seemed to be in a sound sleep. Kitty shook her by the arm; but the woman only moaned and moved uneasily, then snored more stertorously than before. The thought crossed Kitty's mind that, perhaps, Hugo had not wanted Mrs. Samson to be awake.

She made up her mind to go to the housekeeper's room. It was situated in that wing of the house which Kitty had once learnt to know only too well. For some reason or other Hugo had insisted lately upon the servants taking up their sleeping quarters in this wing; and although Mrs. Shairp, who had returned to Netherglen upon his marriage, protested that it was very inconvenient—"because no sound from the other side of the house could reach their ears"—(how well Kitty remembered her saying this!) yet even she had been obliged to give way to Hugo's will.

Kitty went to the door that communicated with the wing. She turned the handle: it would not open. She shook it, and even knocked, but she dared not make much noise. It was not a door that could be fastened or unfastened from inside. Someone in the main part of the house, therefore, must necessarily have turned the key and taken it away. One thing was evident: the servants had been locked into their own rooms, and it was quite impossible for Mrs. Shairp to come to her mistress's room, unless the person who fastened the door came and unfastened it again.

"I wonder that he did not lock me in," said Kitty to herself, wringing her little hands as she came hopelessly down the great staircase into the hall, and then up again to her own room. She had no doubt but that it was Hugo who had done this thing for some end of his own. "What does he mean? What is it that he does not want us to know?"

She reached her own room as she asked this question of herself. The door resisted her hand as the door of the servants' wing had done. It was locked, too. Hugo—or someone else—had turned the key, thinking that she was safe in her own room, and wishing to keep her a prisoner until morning.

Kitty's blood ran cold. Something was wrong: some dark intention must be in Hugo's mind, or he would not have planned so carefully to keep the household out of Mrs. Luttrell's room. She remembered that she had seen a light in a bed-room near Hugo's own—the room where Stevens usually slept. Should she rouse him and ask for his assistance? No: she knew that this man was a mere tool of Hugo's; she could not trust him to help her against her husband's will. There was nothing for it but to do what she could, without help from anyone. She would be brave for Mrs. Luttrell's sake, although she had not been brave for her own.

Oh, why had she not made her warning to Vivian a little stronger? Why had Brian Luttrell not come home that night to Netherglen? It was too late to expect him now.

Her heart beat fast and her hands trembled, but she went resolutely enough to the dressing-room from which Hugo had done his best to exclude her. The door was slightly ajar: oh wonderful good fortune! and the fire was out. The room was in darkness; and the door leading into Mrs. Luttrell's apartment stood open—she had a full view of its warmly lighted space.

She remained motionless for a few minutes: then seeing her opportunity, she glided behind the thick curtain that screened the window. Here she could see the great white bed with its heavy hangings of crimson damask, and the head of the sick woman in its frilled cap lying on the pillows: she could see also her husband's face and figure, as he stood beside the little table on which Mrs. Luttrell's medicine bottles were usually kept, and she shivered at the sight.

His face wore its craftiest and most sinister expression. His eyes were narrowed like those of a cat about to spring: the lines of his face were set in a look of cruel malice, which Kitty had learned to know. What was he doing? He had a tumbler in one hand, and a tiny phial in the other: he was measuring out some drops of a fluid into the glass.

He set down the little bottle on the table, and held up the tumbler to the light. Then he took a carafe and poured a tea-spoonful of water on the liquid. Kitty could see the phial on the table very distinctly. It bore in red letters the inscription: "Poison." And again she asked herself: what was Hugo going to do?

Breathlessly she watched. He smiled a little to himself, smelt the liquid, and held it once more towards the light, as if to judge with his narrowed eyes of the quantity required. Then, with a noiseless foot and watchful eye, he moved towards the bed, still holding the tumbler in his hand. He looked down for a moment at the pale and wrinkled face upon the pillow; then he spoke in a peculiarly smooth and ingratiating tone of voice.

"Aunt Margaret," he said, "I have brought you something to make you sleep."

He had placed the glass to her lips, when a movement in the next room made him start and lift his eyes. In another moment his wife's hands were on his arm, and her eyes were blazing into his own. The liquor in the glass was spilt upon the bed. Hugo turned deadly pale.

"What do you mean? What do you want?" he said, with a look of mingled rage and terror. "What are you doing here?"

"I have come to save her—from you." She was not afraid, now that the words were said, now that she had seen the guilty look upon his face. She confronted him steadily; she placed herself between him and the bed. Hugo uttered a low but emphatic malediction on her "meddlesome folly."

"Why are you not in your room?" he said. "I locked you in."

"I was not there. Thank God that I was not."

"And why should you thank God?" said Hugo, who stood looking at her with an ugly expression of baffled cunning on his face. "I was doing no harm. I was giving her a sleeping-draught."

"Would she ever have waked?" asked Kitty, in a whisper.

She looked into her husband's eyes as she spoke, and she knew from that moment that the accusation was based on no idle fancy of her own. In heart, at least, he was a murderer.

But the question called forth his worst passions. He cursed her again—bitterly, blasphemously—then raised his hand and struck her with his closed fist between the eyes. He knew what he was doing: she fell to the ground, stunned and bleeding. He thrust her out of his way; she lay on the floor between the bed and the window, moaning a little, but for a time utterly unconscious of all that went on around her.

Hugo's preparations had been spoilt. He was obliged to begin them over again. But this time his nerve was shaken: he blundered a little once or twice. Kitty's low moan was in his ears: the paralysed woman upon the bed was regarding him with a look of frozen horror in her wide-open eyes. She could not move: she could not speak, but she could understand.

He turned his back upon the two, and measured out the drops once more into the glass. His hand shook as he did so. He was longer about his work than he had been before. So long that Kitty came to herself a little, and watched him with a horrible fascination. First the drops: then the water; then the sleeping-draught, from which the sleeper was not to awake, would be ready.

Kitty did not know how she found strength or courage to do at that moment what she did. It seemed to her that fear, sickness, pain, all passed away, and left her only the determination to make one desperate effort to defeat her husband's ends.

She knew that the window by which she lay was unshuttered. She rose from the ground, she reached the window-sill and threw up the sash, almost before Hugo knew what she was doing. Then she sent forth that terrible, agonised cry for help, which reached the ears of the four men who were even at that moment waiting and listening at the garden door.

Hugo dropped the glass. It was shivered to pieces on the floor, and its contents stained the rug on which it fell. He strode to the window and stopped his wife's mouth with his hands, then dragged her away from it, and spoke some bitter furious words.

"Do you want to hang me?" he said. "Keep quiet, or I'll make you repent your night's work——"

And then he paused. He had heard the sound of opening doors, of heavy steps and strange voices upon the stairs. He turned hastily to the dressing-room, and he was confronted on the threshold by the determined face and flashing eyes of his cousin, Brian Luttrell. He cast a hurried glance beyond and around him; but he saw no help at hand. Kitty had sunk fainting to the ground: there were other faces—severe and menacing enough—behind Brian's: he felt that he was caught like a wild beast in a trap. His only course was to brazen out the matter as best he could; and this, in the face of Brian Luttrell, of Percival Heron, of old Mr. Colquhoun, it was hard to do. In spite of himself his face turned pale, and his knees shook as he spoke in a hoarse and grating tone.

"What does this disturbance mean?" he said. "Why do you come rushing into Mrs. Luttrell's room at this hour of the night?"

"Because," said Brian, taking him by the shoulder, "your wife has called for help, and we believe that she needs it. Because we know that you are one of the greatest scoundrels that ever trod the face of the earth. Because we are going to bring you to justice. That is why!"

"These are very fine accusations," said Hugo, with a pale sneer, "but I think you will find a difficulty in proving them, Mr.—Vasari."

"I shall have at least no difficulty in proving that you stole money and forged my brother's name three years ago," said Brian, in a voice that was terrible in its icy scorn. "I shall have no difficulty in proving to the world's satisfaction that you shamefully cheated Dino Vasari, and that you twice—yes, twice—tried to murder him, in order to gain your own ends. Hugo Luttrell, you are a coward, a thief, a would-be murderer; and unless you can prove that you were in my mother's room with no evil intent (which I believe to be impossible) you shall be branded with all these names in the world's face."

"There is no proof—there is no legal proof," cried Hugo, boldly. But his lips were white.

"But there is plenty of moral proof, young man," said Mr. Colquhoun's dry voice. "Quite enough to blast your reputation. And what does this empty bottle mean and this broken glass? Perhaps your wife can tell us that."

There was a momentary silence. Mr. Colquhoun held up the little bottle, and pointed with raised eyebrows to the label upon it. Heron was supporting his sister in his arms and trying to revive her: Fane and the impassive constable barred the way between Hugo and the door.

In that pause, a strange, choked sound came from the bed. For the first time for many months Mrs. Luttrell had slightly raised her hand. She said the name that had been upon her lips so many times during the last few weeks, and her eyes were fixed upon the man whom for a lifetime she had called her son.

"Brian!" she said, "Brian!"

And he, suddenly turning pale, relaxed his hold upon Hugo's arm and walked to the bed-side. "Mother," he said, leaning over her, "did you call me? Did you speak to me?"

She looked at him with wistful eyes: her nerveless fingers tried to press his hand. "Brian," she murmured. Then, with a great spasmodic effort: "My son!"

The attention of the others had been concentrated upon this little scene; and for the moment both Fane and Mr. Colquhoun drew nearer to the bed, leaving the door of Mrs. Luttrell's bed-room unguarded. The constable was standing in the dressing-room. It was then that Hugo saw his chance, although it was one which a sane man would scarcely have thought of taking. He made a rush for the bed-room door.

Whither should he go? The front door was bolted and barred; but he supposed that the back door would be open. He never thought of the entrance to the garden by which Brian Luttrell had got into the house. He dashed down the staircase; he was nimbler and lighter-footed than Fane, who was immediately behind him, and he knew the tortuous ways and winding passages of the house, as Fane did not. He gained on his pursuer. Down the dark stone passages he fled: the door into the back premises stood wide open. There was a flight of steep stone steps, which led straight to a kitchen and thence into the yard. He would have time to unbolt the kitchen door, even if it were not already open, for Fane was far, far behind.

But there was no light, and there was a sudden turn in the steps which he had forgotten. Fane reached the head of the staircase in time to hear a cry, a heavy crashing fall, a groan. Then all was still.