And just then there flashed into his mind the one notable occasion on which the barrister had run across him, his intriguing letter and the ineffectual visit which had followed it--ineffectual as he had supposed, but which might nevertheless, he reflected now, have had its results, ironical and inopportune enough. It was a memory of no importance, and yet it seemed just then to be the last of a long train of small lights that led to a whole torch of illumination, in which the existence of little Margot and her quaint juxtaposition with his friend, which in his general easy attitude towards the fantastic he had not troubled to investigate, was amply and generously justified. He turned round suddenly, caught his friend's thin hand, which he held. "Ah, don't trouble to explain, to make me understand," he murmured. "It's enough that I understand you have done something very fine, that you are the most generous of men." Rainham was silent for a moment: he had no longer the physical capacity of smiling; but there was a gleam of the old humour in his eyes, as he replied: "Only the most fortunate--in my friends; they are so clever, they see things so quickly. You make this very easy." Oswyn did not shift for a while from his position: he was touched, moved more deeply than he showed; and there was a trace of emotion in his voice--of something which resembled envy. "The happy woman! It is she who ought to know, to understand." "It is for that I wished to tell you," went on Rainham faintly, "that she might know some day, that there might be just one person who could give her the truth in its season. Yes! I wanted her to be always in ignorance of what she had made of her life, of the kind of man she has married. She was such a child; it seemed too pitiful. It was for that I did it, damned myself in her eyes, to give her a little longer--a sort of respite. Very likely I made a mistake! Those things can't be concealed for ever, and the longer the illusion lasts, the more bitter the awakening. Only if it might serve her later, in her darkest hour, as a sort of after-thought, it won't have been quite vain. That is how I see it now: I want her to know immensely--to know that she has always been unspeakably dear to me. Ah, don't mistake me! It's not for myself, it's not yet; I shall have done with life, done with love, by that time. When one is as tired as I am, death seems very good; only it hasn't those things. Nothing can make any difference to me; I am thinking of her, that some day or other it will be for her benefit to understand, to remember----" "To remember?" "Yes, to remember," repeated Rainham quietly, "that her unhappiness has its compensation; if she has been bitterly wronged, she has also been fervently loved."