The pressure of her weak arms round his neck thrilled him with an exquisite tenderness, a voluptuous pity. Surely, surely in his heart of hearts he had never loved any woman as he loved her. She comforted him; she whispered things too sacred for perfect utterance. It struck him from time to time that she had no clear notion of the nature of the wrongs she forgave, just as by some miracle her mind had dwelt apart from everything that was base in her own marriage. Her ideas of evil were vague and bodiless. She may have conceived Nevill to have been the victim of some malign intellectual influence, the thrall, perhaps, of some Miss Batchelor _sans merci_. There may have been mysteries, gulfs before which she shuddered, dim regions which she could only just divine. He did not know that with women like his wife there is all infinity between what they realize and what they fear. Yet within its range of vision her love was terribly clearsighted. And now, one by one, Tyson's sins fell from him in the purifying fire of his wife's fancy. He staggered to his feet and looked round him with glazed eyes; he was drunk with his own emotions. She followed his gaze; it was caught by some object above her bed. "Hallo," said he, "what's my old sword doing there? My beauty!" "I brought it in," said she. "What did you do that for, eh?" "I don't know. I think I thought that some day you'd walk off with it somewhere, and that if you did that, you'd never come back again. So you see I liked to know it was hanging safe up there when I was asleep. You don't mind, do you?" He muttered something about "rust" and "an outside wall." "It's all right. I've cleaned it myself. I used to take it down and look at it every day." "When did you do that, Molly?" "All the time you were away." "Good God!" He took the sword down from the nail where it hung by a red cord. "You won't find a speck of dust on it anywhere," said she. He had drawn the sword from its scabbard and laid it across his knee. He felt its edge; he drew his finger down the long groove that ran along the center of the blade; his gaze rested almost passionately on the floral arabesque that fringed that bed of the river of blood. Not a spot of rust from hilt to point; the scabbard, too, was bright and clean. He held up the sword, still looking at it with the eyes of a lover; a quick turn of his wrist, and it leapt and flashed in the sun. He turned to his wife, smiling. "Isn't she a beauty?" said he. Fear gripped her heart. She may have had shadowy notions of Tyson's conjugal infidelities, but she had a very clear idea of the power of her rival, the sword. She did not know that he was merely moved by the spirit of Henley's verse. "Take it away," she said; "I don't like the look of it." "Well, it's not a nice thing to have hanging over your head." He took it away and hung it in its old place in the dining-room.