He smiled bitterly at her mistake, and fixed his eyes on her as he asked:-- 'Could you change a man, if you gave yourself to him? Could you drive out his devil, and make a new man of him? Could you give him a new life, a new heart, a new character?' 'I should have no such hopes. My eyes would be quite open.' Her thoughts were on Beaufort Chance. 'No, but couldn't you?' he urged, with a wistful persistence. 'If you knew the worst of him and would still look for something good--something you could love and could use to make the rest better? Couldn't you make him cease being what he hated being? Couldn't you have a power greater than the power of the enemy in him? If you loved him, I mean.' 'How could I love him?' she asked wonderingly. 'If he loved you?' 'What does such a man mean by love?' she murmured scornfully. 'I wonder if you could do anything like that,' he went on. 'Women have, I suppose. Could you?' 'Oh, don't talk about the thing. I hope I may have courage to throw it aside.' He started a little. 'Ah, you mean---- No, I was thinking of something else.' 'And how could such a woman as I am make any man better?' She smiled in a faint ridicule of the idea; but she ceased to think of leaving him, and sat down by the table. For the moment he seemed to pay little attention to where she was or what she did; he spoke to her indeed, but his air was absent and his eyes aloof. 'Because, if the woman couldn't, if it turned out that she couldn't, the last state would be worse than the first. Murder added to _felo de se_! There's that to consider.' Now he returned to her in an active consciousness of her presence. 'Suppose you loved a man who had one great--well, one great devil in him? Could you love a man with a devil in him?' There was a touch of humour hardly won in his voice. Trix responded to it. 'With a thousand, if he was a man after all!' 'Ah, yes, I daresay. But with one--one immense fellow--a fellow who had sat on him and flattened him for years? Could you fight the fellow and beat him?' Trix thought. 'I think I might have perhaps, before--before I got a devil too, you know.' 'Say he was a swindler--could you keep him straight? Say he was cruel--could you make him kind?' He paused an instant. 'Suppose he was a churl--could you open his heart?' 'All that would be very, very hard, even for a good woman,' said Trix Trevalla. 'And you know that in a case something like those I failed before.' 'Because, if you couldn't, it would be hell to you, and worse hell to him.' 'Yes,' murmured Trix. 'That would be it exactly.' 'But if you could----' He walked to the window and looked out. 'It would be something like pulling down the other side of the Inn and giving the sun fair play,' said he.