"Oh, ever so slightly," he gently waived my question; then turned to me, as though confidingly: "but just well enough to be terribly shocked at the sort of death she chose for herself.... As aimless, foolish, and certainly as useless as you like, she had after all lived a wonderful, perhaps a beautiful life--only to die as any damned bankrupt might die in a 15th floor-flat in a Manhattan block!" The sudden bitterness in his voice made me look sharply at him, but he was too quick for me, and retrieved himself with a frank and altogether engaging smile which deprecated his involuntary--as he naïvely showed it to have been--seriousness. By this time I had quite recovered from my bad-tempered stupor, and was acutely interested. I just waited. "Curiously enough," he said, after a short silence, "when I read about her suicide in the paper the other day it was not so much about her that I thought, as about an incident which arose from my acquaintance with her, years ago.... But are you sure I am not being very tedious?" "Each word you say is shortening this walk," I answered quickly; how seldom can one dress the truth in purple and fine linen! "Well, then," he went on genially, "in connection with Consuelo's name came to my mind an incident in which an acquaintance, almost a stranger, stood me in better stead than a friend has ever done. I have never seen him since, I have never thanked him--nor cursed him, as I will explain--for his startling help in that really cruel emergency. But I can't give you the incident without its background; for standing alone it means almost nothing, it is just a trick, one of destiny's sleights of hand. It takes its colour from a, well, imperfect passion, its background. And its background is Consuelo Carew, as I knew her twenty years ago. "I met her just after she had married my friend Tristram Carew. She may have been, at the outside, twenty years old, then, but though there was nothing of the precocious young minx about her, she was more fully developed, more complete, than any other young woman of that age that I am now likely to meet. The only thing that was clear about her was her complexion. She wasn't what we mean by a 'girl' except in freshness, colouring, and zest--and what an amazing, embracing zest for life that was! She never lost it, she can't ever have lost it, it was her very being. I almost believe that, if we but knew the secret, this last impulsive stupidity of hers might somehow take on the splendour of an enthusiasm--but for what, for what?