Whereas she
contemned Louis for having confessed.
"He thought he was dying and so he confessed!" she reflected with
asperity. "He hadn't even the pluck to go through with what he had
begun.... Ah! If I had committed a crime and once denied it, I would
deny it with my last breath, and no torture should drag it out of me!"
And she thought: "I am punished. This is my punishment for letting
myself be engaged while Mrs. Maldon was dying."
Often she had dismissed as childish the notion that she was to blame
for accepting Louis just when she did. But now it returned full of
power and overwhelmed her. And like a whipped child she remembered
Mrs. Maldon's warning: "My nephew is not to be trusted. The woman
who married him would suffer horribly." And she was the woman who had
married him. It seemed to her that the warnings of the dying must of
necessity prove to be valid.
Some mysterious phenomenon on the window-blind at her right hand
attracted her attention, and she looked round, half startled. It was
the dawn, furtive and inexorable. She had watched dawns, and she had
watched them in that very bedroom. Only on the previous morning the
dawn had met her smarting and wakeful eyes, and she had imagined that
no dawn could be more profoundly sad!.
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