“What we know now----” he began stiffly. “What we knew before was quite enough!” interrupted Mrs. Romayne. “When one has arrived violently at the foot of the precipice, it is of no particular moment how long one has been living on the precipice’s edge. While nothing was known, Mr. Romayne was only on the precipice’s edge, and as no one knew of the precipice it was practically as though none existed. Directly one thing came out it was all over! He was over the edge. Nothing could make it either better or worse.” She spoke almost carelessly, though very bitterly, as though she felt her words to be almost truisms, and Falconer stared at her for a moment in silence. Then he said with stern formality, as though he were making a deliberate effort to realise her point of view: “You imply that Mr. Romayne’s fall--his going over the edge of the precipice, if I may adopt your figure--consisted in the discovery of his misdeeds. Do you mean that you think it would have been better if nothing had ever been known?” Mrs. Romayne raised her eyebrows. “Of course!” she said amazedly. Then catching sight of her cousin’s face she shrugged her shoulders with a little gesture of deprecating concession. “Oh, of course, I don’t mean that Mr. Romayne himself would have been any better if nothing had ever come out,” she said impatiently. “The right and wrong and all that kind of thing would have been the same, I suppose. But I don’t see how ruin and suicide improve the position.” She rose as she spoke, and Falconer made no answer. Mrs. Romayne had touched on the great realities of life, the everlasting mystery of the spirit of man with its unfathomable obligations and disabilities; had touched on them carelessly, patronisingly, as “all that kind of thing.” She was as absolutely blind to the depth of their significance as is a man without eyesight to the illimitable spaces of the sky above him. To Falconer her tone was simply scandalising. He did not understand her ignorance. He could not touch the pathos of its limitations and the possibilities by which it was surrounded. The grim irony of such a tone as used by the ephemeral of the immutable was beyond his ken. “I have several things to see to upstairs,” Mrs. Romayne went on after a moment’s pause. “I shall go up now, and I think, if you will excuse me, I will not come down again. We start so early. Good night!” “Good night!” he returned stiffly; and with a little superior, contemptuous smile on her face she went away. CHAPTER V