“What would you do, Colonel Quaritch, if you had killed the only thing you loved in the whole world?” she asked dreamily. “Oh, what am I saying?—I am off my head. Leave me—go and tell Ida; it will be good news for Ida.” Accordingly he started for the Castle, having first picked up his gun on the spot where it had fallen from the hands of Mrs. Quest. And then it was that for the first time the extraordinary importance of this dreadful accident in its bearing upon his own affairs flashed upon his mind. If Cossey died he could not marry Ida, that was clear. This was what Mrs. Quest must have meant when she said that it would be good news for Ida. But how did she know anything about Ida’s engagement to Edward Cossey? And, by Jove! what did the woman mean when she asked what he would do if he had killed the only thing he loved in the world? Cossey must be the “only thing she loved,” and now he thought of it, when she believed that he was dead she called him “Edward, Edward.” Harold Quaritch was as simple and unsuspicious a man as it would be easy to find, but he was no fool. He had moved about the world and on various occasions come in contact with cases of this sort, as most other men have done. He knew that when a woman, in a moment of distress, calls a man by his Christian name it is because she is in the habit of thinking of him and speaking to him by that name. Not that there was much in that by itself, but in public she called him “Mr. Cossey.” “Edward” clearly then was the “only thing she loved,” and Edward was secretly engaged to Ida, and Mrs. Quest knew it. Now when a man who is not her husband has the fortune, or rather the misfortune, to be the only thing a married woman ever loved, and when that married woman is aware of the fact of his devotion and engagement to somebody else, it is obvious, he reflected, that in nine cases out of ten the knowledge will excite strong feelings in her breast, feelings indeed which in some natures would amount almost to madness.