"Yes?" I gently urged him. "About his wife coming up. I didn't see her till next morning. I expect she was tired out with the journey; anyway, her face was as gray as that Michelet paper there. And Philip was done in too. That's why I didn't want to make any bother. I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. I don't know what's happened to us all." I could have told him. It was the Case that had happened. "Mrs. Esdaile too--she was just the same----" Naturally. The Case was the same. "I hadn't very much talk with her. Of course, I asked her how Joan was----" Yes, Joan was in the Case too. "And she told me she'd seen Dawdy the night before. Dawdy was all a bundle of nerves, and Mrs. Esdaile put her to bed. She told me that if she were me she'd go round there at once and tell her--tell her----" But here he broke down suddenly and completely. He sank on the edge of his bed and buried his face in his hands. He shook with sobs. "Oh," he broke out uncontrollably, "it's all that beast--that beast Cunningham----" "Oh no," I thought; "it wasn't Cunningham; it was the Case." "You don't know the life that brute led her," he went on. "Drunken blackguard--women all over the place--and Dawdy, Dawdy at home! I hope he's in hell! Killed her heart he did. Can you blame her for not wanting to chance it again? I hardly had the heart to beg her, I was so broken up. She admitted she'd nothing against me. She just wanted to be right away from all men. So I pay for that beast. Somebody always has to pay, I expect. If only I'd seen her before he did----" Presently he was better. He got up and began to move about again. "Sorry," he said shortly. "But what would you do?" "Well, I should shave for one thing," I said quietly. "And for another, I don't think I'd make up my mind that everything was entirely hopeless. You never know what'll happen. It may be all right presently." "I suppose you're right," he admitted. "No good chucking your hand in like this. Sorry. But it is a bit upsetting, you know." Could I at that moment have added to his troubles by telling him about Westbury, the ladder and the pistol in his pocket? Perhaps I could have done. Anyway, I didn't. VIII I recognized the more readily the separate and inhuman vitality this Case of ours was beginning to assume when I carefully considered its action upon myself. My connection with it was slight by comparison with that of some of the others, but I was aware of its operation. The attitudes into which it began to constrain me were not quite natural attitudes. It exercised pressure. What pressure?