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him?”
    “I don't know—but he's better than most police. Why did she do it, Edith? I mean, what does she say?”
    Edith bit her lip. “That's the worst part of it. Apparently she said it was out of jealousy over Thaddeus and Louisa.”
    “Oh—I...” Hester was momentarily thrown into confusion.
    “I know.” Edith looked wretched. “It is very sordid, isn't it? And unpleasantly believable, if you know Alex. She is unconventional enough for something so wild and so foolish to enter her mind. Except that I really don't believe she ever loved Thaddeus with that sort of intensity, and I am quite sure she did not lately.”
    For a moment she looked embarrassed at such candor, then her emotions at the urgency and tragedy of it took over again. “Please, Hester, do not allow your natural repugnance for such behavior to prevent you from doing what you can to help her. I don't believe she killed him at all. I think it was far more probably Sabella—God forgive her—or perhaps I should say God help her. I think she may honestly be out of her mind.” Her face tightened into a somber unhap-piness.”And Alex taking the guilt for her will not help anyone. They will hang an innocent person, and Sabella in her lucid hours will suffer even more—don't you see that?”
    “Yes of course I see it,” Hester agreed, although in honesty she thought it not at all improbable that Alexandra Carlyon might well have killed her husband exactly as she had confessed. But it would be cruel, and serve no purpose, to say so to Edith now, when she was convinced of Alexandra's innocence, or passionately wished to be.”Have you any idea why Alexandra would feel there was some cause for jealousy over the general and Mrs. Furnival?”
    Edith's eyes were bright with mockery and pain.
    “You have not yet met Louisa Furnival, or you would not bother to ask. She is the sort of woman anyone might be jealous of.” Her expressive face was filled with dislike, mockery, and something which could almost have been a kind of admiration. “She has a way of walking, an air to her, a smile that makes you think she has something that you have not. Even if she had done nothing whatsoever, and your husband found no interest in her at all, it would be easy to imagine he had, simply because of her manner.”
    “That does not sound very hopeful.”
    “Except that I would be amazed if Thaddeus ever gave her more than a passing glance. He really was not in the least a flirt, even with Louisa. He was ...” She lifted her shoulders very slightly in a gesture of helplessness. “He was very much the soldier, a man's man. He was always polite to women, of course, but I don't think he was ever fearfully comfortable with us. He didn’t really know what to talk about. Naturally he had learned, as any well-bred man does, but it was learned, if you know what I mean.” She looked at Hester questioningly. “He was brilliant at action, brave, decisive, and nearly always right in his judgment; and he knew how to express himself to his men, and to new young men interested in the army. He used to come alight then; I’ve watched his eyes and seen how much he cared.”
    She sighed. “He always assumed women weren't interested, and that's not true. I would have been—but it hardly matters now, I suppose. What I'm trying to say is that one doesn't flirt with conversation about military strategy and the relative merits of one gun over another, least of all with someone like Louisa. And even if he did, one does not commit murder over such a thing, it is . . .” Her face puckered, and for a moment Hester wondered with sudden hurt what Oswald Sobell had been like, and what pain Edith might have suffered in their brief marriage, what wounds of jealousy she herself had known. Then the urgency of the present reasserted itself and she returned to the subject of Alexandra.
    “I imagine it is probably better that the truth should be learned, whatever it is,” she said aloud to