Mrs. Tropenell stopped abruptly. What she had just said led to a path she did not mean to follow. But she soon realised with dismay that she had said too much, or too little. "Do you mean," said Oliver hoarsely, "that Pavely--that Pavely----" he left his question unfinished, but she knew he meant to exact an answer and she did not keep him waiting long for it. Still she chose her words very carefully. "I think that Godfrey Pavely, in the matter of his relations to his wife, is a very unfortunate, and, some would say, a very ill-used man, Oliver." Oliver Tropenell suddenly diminished the distance between his mother and himself. The carefully chosen, vague words she had just uttered had been like balm poured into a festering and intolerably painful wound. "Poor devil!" he said contemptuously, and there was a rather terrible tone of triumph, as well as of contempt, in the muttered exclamation. Mrs. Tropenell was startled and, what she seldom was, frightened. She felt she was face to face with an elemental force--the force of hate. She repeated his last words, but in how different a spirit, in how different a tone! "Poor devil? Yes, Oliver, Godfrey is really to be pitied, and I ask you to believe me, my son, when I say that he does do his duty by Laura according to his lights." "Mother?" He put out his hand in the darkness and just touched hers. "Why is it that Laura is so much fonder of you than you are of Laura? You don't respect--or even like--Godfrey?" She protested eagerly. "But I _am_ fond of Laura--very, very fond, Oliver! But though, as you say, I neither really like nor respect Godfrey, I can't help being sorry for him. He once said to me--it's a long time ago--'I thought I was marrying a woman, but I've married a marble statue. I'm married to something like _that_'--and he pointed to 'The Wingless Victory' your father brought me, years ago, from Italy. Godfrey is an unhappy man, Oliver--come, admit that you know that?" "I think she's far, far more unhappy than he is! No man with so thoroughly good an opinion of himself is ever _really_ unhappy. Still, it's a frightful tangle." He stopped short for a moment, then in a very low voice, he asked her, "Is there no way of cutting it through, mother?" Suddenly he answered his own question in a curiously musing, detached tone. "I suppose the only way in which such a situation is ever terminated is by death." "Yes," she said slowly, "but it's not a usual termination. Still, I have known it happen." More lightly she went on: "If Laura died, Godfrey wouldn't escape Katty a second time. And one must admit that she would make him an almost perfect wife." "_And if Godfrey died, mother?_" Mrs. Tropenell felt a little tremor of fear shoot through her burdened heart. This secret, intimate conversation held in the starry night was drifting into strange, sinister, uncharted channels. But her son was waiting for an answer.