Once more Madame Fontaine checked herself in the act of yielding to him.

Her dead husband had got between them again.

The wild words he had spoken to her, in the first horror of the discovery that his poor imbecile servant had found and tasted the fatal drug, came back to her memory--"If he dies I shall not survive him.
And I firmly believe I shall not rest in my grave." She had never been, like her husband, a believer in ghosts: superstitions of all sorts were to her mind unworthy of a reasonable being.

And yet at that moment, she was so completely unnerved that she looked round the old Gothic room, with a nameless fear throbbing at her heart.
It was enough--though nothing appeared: it was enough--though superstitions of all sorts were unworthy of a reasonable being--to shake her fell purpose, for the time.

Nothing that Jack could say had the least effect on her.