"Sssh--it's got to come out now! I was happy till that night--you know the night I mean--and that night I was fool enough to think it was possible to stop up there--away up in the air. I gave you and got from you that night what no other woman on earth could have done, and I thought we could stop at that. I thought I could go on living at that. I thought that would be enough for me; and when I found it wasn't, I began to--bolster it up. You've seen Billy--you know what I mean. And I still have something of you that nobody else has, and--I want to give it away! I want you to give her that too! I advise you to tell her and leave me with nothing! I must be mad! Jim"--her voice dropped with startling effect--"you once said that to tell her would be to kill her: _if I could only think that_!... But there, you'll tell her, and take away the last thing I have of you.... But she won't get that thing. It's beyond her. That's yours and mine whether you wish it or not. If you don't believe me, try it. Tell her. Tell her her husband made away with her sweetheart; tell her why; tell her what you've told me, and if she takes it as I did, I haven't another word to say. I hate her; I'm not running away from that; so perhaps I'm not just. Perhaps there is a chance: if so, it's your only one. I've had no luck. I'm out of it, and there's no more to say. Give me a match." She took up and relighted her half-smoked cigarette. I have merely set down what she said, and the way she said it; for the rest, I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Perhaps it is unusual to allow these freedoms to be taken with your wife, but I think you will admit that the occasion was unusual. She had told me, in effect, that murderers ought to be careful whom they marry, and that I had married the wrong woman: but she had left out of the account one thing that made all the difference. You know as well as I what she had left out--the supreme sanctification of the flesh: "With my body I thee worship."... It was Evie, not Louie Causton, with whom I had heard that nightingale sing on Wimbledon Common. They had been Evie's lips, not Louie's, that had not sought to escape my own on that September evening in Kensington Gardens. It was Evie whom I had married.... It was natural that Louie should see how things might conceivably have been different; you can say that however they turn out; and perhaps that was where the fatality came in. Circumstance, propinquity, accident, a step rightly or wrongly taken, and the rest is predicated with a terrible inevitability. Louie had had no luck; and now, not because I had placed a crushing weight upon her, but because I had given her the pity while another got the love, she had broken out upon me. At any rate, I saw her own position sadly clearly now. And, there being no more to say, she rose.