Slipping his arm through mine, O’Rane led me into a field by the roadside. Though he must have guessed that Eric’s letter had something to do with my frantic appeal the evening before, I could not speak at present for fear of breaking down. ‘_Boyish to cry—can’t help it—bad fever—weak—ill._’ For many moments my head sang with Mr. Jingle’s clipped phrases. A shock for Ivy? Some one had told me her marriage was all the failure that Mr. Justice Maitland had predicted. It would have been better if she had married Eric: she might have kept him alive. It would have been better if Barbara had married him, better if he had never left America, best of all if he and she and I had never been born. . . . “Babs can’t be ill,” O’Rane murmured as though he were thinking aloud; “or you wouldn’t be here. Sit down and smoke a cigarette.” When he returned with the basket, I was able to tell him. I wondered at the time, I wonder still, whether I did right; but I know that I could not help it. He let me talk myself out, only asking dispassionately at the end: “What are you going to do about it?” And I talked myself out a second time, until the fever left me and I lay back on the rug, almost too much exhausted to move or think. Physical infidelity, committed in a moment of passion, stood in relation to this long infidelity of spirit as a blow struck in hot blood stands to a calculated and artfully concealed murder. Had Barbara left me and come back, as Sonia left and came back to Raney, I believe I could have forgiven her. After deceiving me once, she could deceive me again; to get what she wanted, in her own way, she would sacrifice me as she had sacrificed Jack Waring and Eric Lane. It was all over. And I wanted her desperately. And it was all over. Hitherto, I had always pretended that there was something I did not understand in her tragic entanglements: Jack and Eric were straight as the day; if they both fled from the woman they both loved, I wished to think that they were parted by a lover’s quarrel which both were too proud or obstinate to heal; I refused to believe that they had run from her in disgust. “I’m here because Barbara will soon be coming back to London,” I told O’Rane. “I . . . couldn’t divorce her if I wanted to; but I can let her divorce me.” . . . “She won’t be very . . . happy alone,” he answered reflectively. “When Jack Waring disappeared, she turned to Eric out of sheer loneliness and misery; when Eric went, she turned to you. If you go, George, she’ll turn to some one else. A married woman without children, without a husband, more lonely and miserable than ever before . . . Well, you won’t have long to wait for your divorce.” Four-and-twenty hours earlier, I should have called my best friend to account if he had warned me that Barbara needed watching. Now she had convicted herself and robbed me of all temptation to defend her.