Yes, a long letter, but he could almost say it backwards. He couldn’t be anything like mad while he could do that?… How had she received his answer—in which he tried to show her the impossibility of any decent man compromising a girl in the way she proposed in her sweet innocence and ignorance. Of course _he_, a half-mad, epileptic, fiend-ridden monomaniac—nay, dangerous lunatic,—could not _marry_. Why, he might murder his own wife under some such circumstances as those under which he attacked Captain Blake. (Splendid fellow Blake! Not every man after such a handling as that would make it his business to prove that his assailant was neither drunk, mad, nor criminal—merely under a hallucination. But for Blake he would now be in jail, or lunatic asylum, to a certainty. The Colonel would have had him court-martialled as a criminal, or else have had him out of the regiment as a lunatic. Nor, as a dangerous lunatic, would he have been allowed to buy himself out when Lucille’s letter and his money arrived. Blake had got him into the position of a perfectly sober and sane person whose mind had been temporarily upset by a night of horror—in which a coffin-quitting corpse had figured, and so he had been able to steer between the cruel rocks of Jail and Asylum to the blessed harbour of Freedom.) Yes—in spite of Blake’s noble goodness and help, Dam knew that he was _not_ normal, that he _was_ dangerous, that he spent long periods on the very border-line of insanity, that he stood fascinated on that border-line and gazed far into the awful country beyond—the Realms of the Mad…. Marry! Not Lucille, while he had the sanity left to say “No”! As for going to live at Monksmead with her and Auntie Yvette—it would be an even bigger crime. Was it for _him_ to make _Lucille_ a “problem” girl, a girl who was “talked about,” a by-word for those vile old women of both sexes whose favourite pastime is the invention and dissemination of lies where they dare, and of even more damaging head-shakes, lip-pursings, gasps and innuendoes where they do not? Was it for _him_ to get _Lucille_ called “The Woman Who Did,” by those scum of the leisured classes, and “That peculiar young woman,” by the better sort of matron, dowager and chaperone,—make her the kind of person from whose company careful mothers keep their innocent daughters (that their market price may never be in danger of the faintest depreciation when they are for sale in the matrimonial market), the kind of woman for whom men have a slightly and subtly different manner at meet, hunt-ball, dinner or theatre-box? Get Lucille “talked about”? No—setting aside the question of the possibility of living under the same roof with her and conquering the longing to marry. No—he had some decency left, tainted as he doubtless was by his barrack-room life.