Chance

"My brother-in-law considered it amusing to chaff me about us introducing

the girl as Miss Smith," said Fyne, going surly in a moment. "He said

that perhaps if he had heard her real name from the first it might have

restrained him. As it was, he made the discovery too late. Asked me to

tell Zoe this together with a lot more nonsense."

Fyne gave me the impression of having escaped from a man inspired by a

grimly playful ebullition of high spirits. It must have been most

distasteful to him; and his solemnity got damaged somehow in the process,

I perceived. There were holes in it through which I could see a new, an

unknown Fyne.

"You wouldn't believe it," he went on, "but she looks upon her father

exclusively as a victim. I don't know," he burst out suddenly through an

enormous rent in his solemnity, "if she thinks him absolutely a saint,

but she certainly imagines him to be a martyr."

It is one of the advantages of that magnificent invention, the prison,

that you may forget people which are put there as though they were dead.

One needn't worry about them. Nothing can happen to them that you can

help. They can do nothing which might possibly matter to anybody. They

come out of it, though, but that seems hardly an advantage to themselves

or anyone else. I had completely forgotten the financier de Barral. The

girl for me was an orphan, but now I perceived suddenly the force of

Fyne's qualifying statement, "to a certain extent." It would have been

infinitely more kind all round for the law to have shot, beheaded,

strangled, or otherwise destroyed this absurd de Barral, who was a danger

to a moral world inhabited by a credulous multitude not fit to take care

of itself. But I observed to Fyne that, however insane was the view she

held, one could not declare the girl mad on that account.

"So she thinks of her father--does she? I suppose she would appear to us

saner if she thought only of herself."

"I am positive," Fyne said earnestly, "that she went and made desperate

eyes at Anthony . . . "

"Oh come!" I interrupted. "You haven't seen her make eyes. You don't

know the colour of her eyes."

"Very well! It don't matter. But it could hardly have come to that if

she hadn't . . . It's all one, though. I tell you she has led him on, or

accepted him, if you like, simply because she was thinking of her father.

She doesn't care a bit about Anthony, I believe. She cares for no one.

Never cared for anyone. Ask Zoe. For myself I don't blame her," added

Fyne, giving me another view of unsuspected things through the rags and

tatters of his damaged solemnity. "No! by heavens, I don't blame her--the

poor devil."