BARBARA
“Barbara, this man”—he paused to look down while he fingered one of her rings—“is an impostor. But if he were not, would you—would you—still wish him dead?”
She looked around at him in surprise.
“Why, what—’tis a strange question. Is there a chance that it is true—that he is what he says?”
He halted at this abrupt questioning and did not meet her eye. “No, Barbara, I have not said so. But suppose he were the real Vicomte de Bresac, would you still wish him dead?”
It was her turn to be discomfited. She averted her head, and her eyes moved restlessly from one object upon the table to another.
“Have I not told you that I hate him?” she said; the voice was almost a whisper. Ferrers looked at her as though he would read the inmost depths of her heart. She met his eyes a moment and then smiled with a little bitter irony that had a touch of melancholy in it.
“Can I find it pleasant thinking,” she went on, “that the houses, the lands, the people who
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