"Yes. I can't remember a time when I wasn't in love with her. I always was, and she never was with me. She liked me--she likes me now--but she's always been so used to the idea of me. I've always been David Dunbar--and that's all. A friend who was always there but nothing more. There was just a moment when I was missing for six months in the middle of the war, I think she really cared then--but soon they heard that I was safe in Germany and it was all as it had been before." "Were her father and mother living?" Harkness asked. "Her father. Her mother died when her youngest brother was born, when she was only six years old. The mother's death upset the father, and he took to drink. He'd always been inclined that way I expect. He was too brilliant a doctor to have landed in that small village without there being some reason. Well, after Mrs. Tobin's death there was simply one trouble after another. Tobin's patients deserted him. The big house on the hill had to be sold and they moved into a small one in the village. He had been a big, jolly, laughing, generous man before, now he was always quarrelling with everybody, insulting the few patients left to him, and so on. Hesther was wonderful. How she kept the house together all those years nobody knew. There was very little she didn't know about life by the time she was ten years old--ordinary life, I mean, not this damned Crispin monstrosity. She always had the pluck and the courage of the devil, and you can fancy what I felt just now when you told me about her asking young Crispin to let her off. That _swine_!" He paused for a moment, then went on hurriedly: "But we haven't much time. I must buck ahead. I was quite an ordinary sort of fellow, of course, but there was nothing I wouldn't do for her if I got a chance. I helped her sometimes, but not so much as I'd have liked. She was always terribly proud. All the things that happened at home made her hold up her head in a kind of defiance. "The odd thing was that she loved her father, and the worse he got the more she loved him. But she loved her young brothers still more. She was mother, sister, nurse, everything to them, and would be still if she'd been let alone. They were nice little chaps too, only a lot younger, of course--one three years, one six. One's in the Navy--very decent fellow--and if he'd been home he'd never have allowed any of this to happen. "Well, the war came when she was quite a kid. I was away most of that time. Then in 1918 my father died and left me a bit of property there in Milton. I came home and asked her to marry me. She thought I was pitying her, and anyway she didn't love me. And I hadn't enough of this world's goods to make the old man keen about me. "Then this devil came along." Dunbar stopped for a moment. They both listened. There was not a sound in the whole house. "What brought him to a village like yours?" asked Harkness, lowering his voice. "I shouldn't have thought that a man like that----"