Perhaps the inevitable might have been avoided if one of several things had happened or not happened. If Sir George had yielded to his niece’s earnest entreaties to be allowed to nurse him, instead of insisting on her confining herself to a couple of runs up to London, each of so few hours’ duration as to involve no swelling of the reckoning at the “d----d pot-house;” if Rupert had not been kept or kept himself in such close attendance on his father as to have no time to see how ill his own affairs were faring; if Féodorovna had been permitted to complete her cure, and exercise momently supervision over her captive at home, instead of being despatched to Brighton--metaphorically kicking and screaming, it is true--but still despatched by a determined doctor and a for once unbullyable father; if Binning’s name had not appeared among the list of officers upon whom the Queen was pleased to bestow the Victoria Cross; if Mafeking had not been relieved! If, if! the convenient, curtsying, carneying preposition, which has salved every malefactor’s conscience since the world began! For the malefactor in question it is but a very imperfect unguent, desperate as is the perseverance with which she uses it. _If, if, if!_ A whole procession of them pass before her in the wakeful silence of the night; and she gives herself the full benefit of them all. But at every morning watch, what a traitor she stands at her own bar! To have taken advantage of “her men’s” absence--the very phrase, lifelong in its employment, seems to reek of hypocrisy--to have taken advantage of their absence, of the heavy sickness of the one, and the selfless devotion of the other, to play them this coward’s trick! Yet her infidelity has only been of the soul, not of the body. Complete as has been and is the unfaithfulness to Rupert of her heart and pulses, up to the 28th of May there has been no physical contact between her and Binning beyond that one grateful touch of a sick man’s lips upon his nurse’s hand, at which not the most monopolizing of lovers could carp. When her self-contempt grows unendurable, she drags this creditable fact of outward propriety to the front, pushing it before her, and hiding behind it at Conscience’s judgment-seat.