I said this firmly and with an air of competence, though, as a matter of fact, I had no idea of what I should have to do. What I wanted first was to get rid of him. Once alone with her, I knew I should get some kind of inspiration. He diverted the argument to himself--he wanted her so much, he would have to suffer so cruelly. "There's no question as to your suffering," I said. "You'll both have to suffer. That can be taken for granted. We're only thinking of the way in which you'll suffer least." "That's true," he admitted, but slowly and reluctantly. "I'm not a terribly rigorous moralist," I went on. "I've a lot of sympathy with Paolo and Francesca and with Pelléas and Mélisande. But you can see for yourself that all such instances end unhappily, and when it's happiness you're primarily in search of--" "Hers--especially," he interposed, with the same deliberation and some of the same unwillingness. "Well, then, isn't your course clear? She'll never be happy with you if she kills the man she runs away from--" He withdrew his cigarette and looked at me, wonderingly. "Kills him? What in thunder do you mean?" I explained my convictions. Howard Brokenshire wouldn't survive his wife's desertion for a month; he might not survive it for a day. He was a doomed man, even if his wife did not desert him at all. He, Stacy Grainger, was young. Mrs. Brokenshire was young. Wouldn't it be better for them both to wait on life--and on the other possibilities that I didn't care to name more explicitly? So he wrestled with himself, and incidentally with me, turning back at last toward the village inn--and his motor. While shaking my hand to say good-by he threw off, jerkily: "I suppose you know my secretary, Strangways, wants to marry you?" My heart seemed to stop beating. "He's--he's never said so to me," I managed to return, but more weakly than I could have wished. "Well he will. He's all right. He's not a fool. I'm taking him with me into some big things; so that if it's the money you're in doubt about--" I had recovered myself enough to say: "Oh no; not at all. But if you're in his confidence I beg you to ask him to think no more about it. I'm engaged--or practically engaged--I may say that I'm engaged--to Hugh Brokenshire." "I see. Then you're making a mistake." I was moving away from him by this time so that I gave him a little smile. "If so, the circumstances are such that--that I must go on making it." "For God's sake don't!" he called after me. "Oh, but I must," I returned, and so we went our ways. On going back to our rooms I found poor, dear little Mrs. Brokenshire packing a small straw suit-case. She had selected it as the only thing she could carry in her hand to the place of the _enlèvement_. She was not a packer; she was not an adept in secrecy. As I entered her room she looked at me with the pleading, guilty eyes of a child detected in the act of stealing sweets, and confessing before he is accused.