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She came closer to my ear, saying: 'I heard the news early. I am come to stay with him, till the last.... We looked at each other some time eye to eye, steadily, she and I: but mine dropped before Clodagh's. A word was on my mouth to say, but I said nothing. The recovery of Peters was not so steady as I had expected. At the end of the first week he was still prostrate.
Toward one that night, his footman ran to knock me up with the news that Peters was very ill. I hurried to his bed-side, and knew by the first glance at his deliriums and his staring pupils that he was poisoned with atropine. Wilson, the electrician, who had passed the evening with him at Clodagh's in Hanover Square, was there. 'What on earth is the matter? he said to me. 'Poisoned, I answered.
A moment more just the little delay of fitting in a pass key and he would catch the culprit red-handed; he would deprive her of the spoils! Clear as a "cut in" from some moving picture, a scene rose before Clodagh's eyes. She saw herself at grips with O'Reilly. She saw him wrench the envelope from her hands as she resisted. She saw herself sobbing over her failure and Angel's lost hopes.
A sister of hers, much older than herself, had married a common country doctor, Peters of Taunton, and this so-called mésalliance made the so-called mésalliance with me doubly detestable in the eyes of her relatives. But Clodagh's extraordinary passion for me was to be stemmed neither by their threats nor prayers. What a flame, after all, was Clodagh! Sometimes she frightened me.
Forced to support his half-fainting guest, he had not put on an outer coat, so the key was within reach of clever and determined fingers. Clodagh's were determined, and she hoped clever. With this design burning in her head and tingling in her hands, she decided to faint again as they started for home, and keep O'Reilly occupied every inch of the way.
It cracked across. Another went the same way, and as she touched the third there came a sound of talking outside the door. "Open it for me with your pass-key, please," a man said. It was O'Reilly's voice. When Beverley Sands had shut the door between Clodagh's room and Sister Lake's, she stood silent before Justin O'Reilly. "Well, Mrs. Sands," he said, "I must congratulate you."