The doctor
tells me that that person was number--"
Mrs. Collins had risen wildly and was standing before us with
blazing eyes. "Yes," she cried, pressing her hands on her breast
as if it were about to burst and tell the secret before her lips
could frame the words, "yes, I killed her, and I would follow her
to the end of the earth if I had not succeeded. She was there, the
woman who had stolen from me what was more than life itself. Yes,
I wrote the note, I poisoned the envelope. I killed her."
All the intense hatred that she had felt for that other woman in
the days that she had vainly striven to equal her in beauty and
win back her husband's love broke forth. She was wonderful,
magnificent, in her fury. She was passion personified; she was
fate, retribution.
Collins looked at his wife, and even he felt the spell. It was not
crime that she had done; it was elemental justice.
For a moment she stood, silent, facing Kennedy. Then the colour
slowly faded from her cheeks. She reeled.
Colling caught her and imprinted a kiss, the kiss that for years
she had longed and striven for again.
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