"Of course it hasn't."

"Nothing can make any difference now then, can it?"

It was too much. He got up and walked up and down the room. Poor Mrs.

Nevill Tyson, she had put his idea into words. She had suggested that

there was a difference, and suggestion is a fatal thing to an unsteady

mind. In that moment of fearful introspection he said to himself that it

was all very well for her to say there was no difference. There was a

difference. She was not exactly lying on a bed of roses; but in the

nature of things her lot was easier than his. There was no comparison

between the man's case and the woman's. He had not sunk into that

serene apathy which is nine-tenths of a woman's virtue. He was not an

invalid--neither was he a saint. It is not necessary to be a saint in

order to be a martyr; poor devils have their martyrdom. Why could not

women realize these simple facts? Why would they persist in believing

the impossible?

His face was very red when he turned round and answered. "I can't talk

about it, Molly. God knows what I feel."

This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of

deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.

He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the

reading. He sat and watched her.

Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman.

Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated

its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it;

as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and

insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it

start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid

dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the

nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life.

He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal

triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead--that was the horrible thing. Beneath

that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would

be young when he was long past middle age.

He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage

that had saved his life--for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate

actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine

ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have

left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable

"accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved

him all the better for it.




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