tolerance came with it. She had not meant, of course--women never did--to play fast and loose with the boy's head. Yet she had done so. He had spent too much money, he had been careless; honest, perhaps, though even that might not be so, no one could tell. Why then should they try to find out now, when it was all irrevocable, when no harm could come out of silence? And George had been a good sort; too good for such an end; besides, even for Gwen's sake silence was best. He felt very bitter against her, very sore; yet such things must not be said about his future wife as might be said if the truth were really known. 'I suppose it had better remain as it is,' he said at last, moodily. 'Cholera has served its turn in such a case before--one of the advantages of living in a land of sudden death. Poor George! I daresay there was treachery. Dan, shading his eyes with his clasped hands, was silent a moment. 'If there was, he had no part in it. I wonder if you remember a conversation in the balcony at Hodinuggur about what a man would do in such a case. "No, you wouldn't, not unless you wanted to be thought guilty." Do you remember saying that, Gordon?' Lewis nodded; it was not a pleasant memory. 'I can't tell you the whole. But I am convinced George shot himself to save me. He knew'--what, perhaps, you don't--that I was engaged to a woman----' Gordon pulled some papers towards him impatiently, and took up a pen, as if to end the subject. 'I suppose it is always "_cherchez la femme_"; yet it does not seem to me an agreeable factor in existence.' '_Cherchez la femme!_' echoed Dan. 'Why not? They are our mothers and sisters, our sweethearts and wives, after all. And have you ever thought, Gordon, what it must be like to look back over a lifetime, and see next to nothing that you would rather have left undone? Or, if you're pious, to take a sort of pride in pillorying yourself for a cross word or a tarradiddle? There isn't a man in a million with that record, but half the women one meets--ay! half the women one patronises--have it. Perhaps it is small blame to anything but fate; still they have it.' 'Or think they have--which has the same effect! You remind me of a countryman of yours, a doctor, I knew once. "The sex," he said, "can't do wrong, and when it does it's hysteria." However, let us leave that poor lad to rest in peace; in a way that is more worth than the happiness of any woman who ever was born. And, look here, make the tale of reports complete, send them to me, and I'll consign them, dates and all, to a pigeon-hole. That is the beauty of official mistakes; you _can_ pigeon-hole them and no one is the wiser, unless, indeed, some personal motive crops up. But that is not likely. So far as I can see, it is to no one's interest to make a row--not even if there is a woman at the bottom of it all.'