Now with the force of her delirium behind her she pinned him against her own interpretation of herself. She dared him with her exhausted, fevered eyes not to believe that she was faultless. In the grey shadows of the gathering dawn she seemed to threaten him with her death. “Do you understand me?” she murmured at last. “Do you see now what I’ve had to bear and what I’m really like?” “Why, yes, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett patiently. “I guess I see what you’re like.” Her eyes questioned him doubtfully, but there was nothing in his expression which revealed any latent sarcasm. Mr. Brett had no expression in his face at all, beyond his grave attentiveness. Hermione was completely exhausted now: she had spoken for nearly two hours without a pause. She closed her searching eyes and slept. Mr. Brett looked out of the open window. It was a still dawn, full of the returning movements of arrested life. Outside in the grey garden the stars were pale in a cloudy sky, the small battered moon was surrounded by an opalescent fiery ring. The silence was broken by the scurry and hoot of hunting owls. A heavy mist swept over the garden and blotted out the shapes of the trees. Mr. Brett did not take up again “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine.” Even that immortal classic failed to rouse any amusement in him. Hermione breathed with the refreshing regularity of a child; her beauty slowly reasserted itself, but Mr. Brett did not see the beauty in her face: he noticed instead, with a pang at his heart, the lines of selfishness and unwavering vanity which her own character had engraved upon it. “I reckon,” he said to himself, “that ‘the last enemy to be destroyed’ _is_ vanity. Murder isn’t a habit, cruelty can’t get on long without conceit. Lies run to it. I never knew a humble liar. “Vanity is the toughest human quality there is—and it’s the most vital. You take it out with a trowel and it gets back with a spade. “It’s trapped Hermione just the way it trapped Theodora.