well understood to be no more than a kind or polite refusal to display naked truth in the merciless clearness of print. Here was the state of things which extorted from Morewood the blunt wish that Quisante might die. Such a desire was hardly cruel to the man himself, since he must now lose all that he had loved best in the market of the world; but it was not the man himself who had been most in Morewood's thoughts. With a penetration sharpened by the memory of his blunder he had appreciated the perverse calamity which had fallen on the man's wife, and had passed swiftly to the conclusion that for her an end by death was the only chance, the only turn of events which could give back to her the chance of a real life to be lived. He knew by what Quisante had attracted and held her; all that, it seemed, was gone now. He divined also in what Quisante repelled and almost terrified her; that would remain so long as breath was in the man and might grow even more intense. A sense of fairness somehow impelled him to his wish; her bargain had turned out so badly; the underlying basis of her marriage was broken; she was left to pay the price to the last penny, but was to get nothing of what she had looked to purchase. Was it not then the part of a courageous man to face his instinctive wish, and to accept it boldly? Cant and tradition apart, it must be the wish of every sensible person. For she knew, she had realised most completely on the very evening when Quisante was struck down, what manner of man he was. She might have endured if she had still been able to tell herself of the wonderful things that he would do. No such comfort was open now. The man was still what he was; but he would do nothing. There came the change. "That's the weak point about marriage as compared with other contractual arrangements," said Morewood to Dick Benyon. "You can never in any bargain ensure people getting what they expect to get--because to do that you'd have to give all of them sense--but in most you can to a certain extent see that they're allowed to keep what they actually did get. In marriage you can't. Something of this sort happens and the whole understanding on which the arrangement was based breaks down." "Do people marry on understandings?" asked Dick doubtfully. "The only way of getting anything like justice for her is that he should die. You must see that?" "I don't know anything about it," said Dick morosely, "but I hear there's no particular likelihood of his dying if he obeys orders and keeps quiet." "Just so, just so," said Morewood. "That's exactly what I mean. Do you suppose she'd ever have taken him if he'd been going to keep quiet? You know why you took him up; well, she did just the same. You know what you found him; she's found him just the same. What's left now? The _role_ of a loving nurse! She's not born a nurse; and how in the devil's name is she to be expected to love him?"