She was a large, impassive, heavy-featured woman with a stern set expression of mouth.

But her telltale eyes were red and glanced at me from between swollen lids.

It was she, then, who wept in the night, and if she did so her husband must know it.

Yet he had taken the obvious risk of discovery in declaring that it was not so.

Why had he done this?
And why did she weep so bitterly?
Already round this pale-faced, handsome, black-bearded man there was gathering an atmosphere of mystery and of gloom.