"I can't sleep," he said. "It's gone wrong again. My head feels as if there was a cold vacuum in it, and my heart beats, and something screws up inside me. I know it's Lucy. She hates me again. I can't stand it." He looked at us with eyes half glazed, obsessed. His face seemed as if the flesh were breaking under the skin, decomposing. "Perhaps, poor thing," said Luke, whose madness seemed really sane this night, "perhaps you hate _her_." Luke's strange concentration instantly made us feel a tension, as of hate, in the Colonel's body. "I?" The Colonel looked up sharply, like a culprit. "I! I wouldn't say that, if I were you." "Perhaps that's what's the matter," said Luke, with mad, beautiful calm. "Why can't you feel kindly towards her, poor thing! She must have been done out of a lot while she lived." It was as if he had one foot in life and one in death, and knew both sides. To us it was like madness. "I--I!" stammered the Colonel; and his face was a study. Expression after expression moved across it: of fear, repudiation, dismay, anger, repulsion, bewilderment, guilt. "I was good to her." "Ah yes," said Luke. "Perhaps _you_ were good to her. But was your body good to poor Lucy's body, poor dead thing!" He seemed to be better acquainted with the ghost than with us. The Colonel gazed blankly at Luke, and his eyes went up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. "My body!" he said blankly. And he looked down amazedly at his little round stomach, under the silk gown, and his stout knee, in its blue-and-white pyjama. "My body!" he repeated blankly. "Yes," said Luke. "Don't you see, you may have been awfully good to her. But her poor woman's body, were you ever good to that?" "She had everything she wanted. She had three of my children," said the Colonel dazedly. "Ah yes, that may easily be. But your body of a man, was it ever good to her body of a woman? That's the point. If you understand the marriage service: with my body I thee worship. That's the point. No getting away from it." The queerest of all accusing angels did Lord Lathkill make, as he sat there with the hand of the other man's wife clasped against his thigh. His face was fresh and naïve, and the dark eyes were bright with a clairvoyant candour, that was like madness, and perhaps was supreme sanity. The Colonel was thinking back, and over his face a slow understanding was coming. "It may be," he said. "It may be. Perhaps, that way, I despised her. It may be, it may be."