There are some supreme moments--they say the moment of violent death is one of them--in which all Life's obscurations are made instantaneously clear; but if my own supreme moment ought to have taken that form, I can only say that it did not. No sudden explanations of the hitherto inexplicable flashed through my mind. Afterwards, when a certain amount of imperfection had supervened between me and that perfect look, these explanations did present themselves, yes, in crowds, but not then. I did not ask why, knowing me for a murderer, she should still take my arm. I did not wonder how she regarded the matter from Merridew's point of view. I did not trouble myself about how she knew, nor, for the matter of that, whether she did know--for she had made no charge, had only put a question. I cared for nothing but that sweet yet terrible depth and stillness I had seen beyond the tourmalines of her eyes. Indeed, somewhere near the Palace, I suddenly found myself irresistibly longing to look into those eyes again. We were approaching another lamp. I stopped. Again I did not notice that I did so under a dripping plane-tree. I looked. They were still the same--flawless transmitters, accesses to the ether of her soul.... Again she put her question. "You did kill that boy, didn't you?" "Yes." (I could not have dared to lie to her.) "Ah!"... We walked on again. And I know not what rest, akin to the longing of a weary spirit for death, I found in it all. Nor do I know whence came the special and unimaginable peace that filled me. For that peace was special. My marriage had been a different rapture; the dreams of the first days of my love had not been the same; and it was perhaps this that I had implored in vain that night when, stretching out among my swags and gargoyles, I had cried to Whatever lay beyond the marbled sky that, might I but be delivered from this body of an ancient death, my life should be a dedicated thing. And now, when I least expected it, I had it. Between me, a man who had committed murder, and her, the mother of a nameless child, something I knew not--something still and splendid and awful--had come into being. Do you wonder that, in the stillness and splendour and awe of it, my brain slumbered within me, so that though those grey abysses full of answers waited for me, not a question did I put?... "Yes," I said. "You know I killed him." And "Ah!" she said again.