‘What did I tell you?’ said Boulte, as though the conversation had been unbroken. ‘You can see for yourself. She cares for him.’ The light began to break into his dull mind, and he went on, ‘And what was he saying to you?’ But Mrs. Vansuythen, with no heart for explanations or impassioned protestations, was kneeling over Mrs. Boulte. ‘Oh, you brute!’ she cried. ‘Are all men like this? Help me to get her into my room and her face is cut against the table. Oh, will you be quiet, and help me to carry her? I hate you, and I hate Captain Kurrell. Lift her up carefully, and now go! Go away!’ Boulte carried his wife into Mrs. Vansuythen’s bedroom, and departed before the storm of that lady’s wrath and disgust, impenitent and burning with jealousy. Kurrell had been making love to Mrs. Vansuythen would do Vansuythen as great a wrong as he had done Boulte, who caught himself considering whether Mrs. Vansuythen would faint if she discovered that the man she loved had forsworn her. In the middle of these meditations, Kurrell came cantering along the road and pulled up with a cheery ‘Good-mornin’. ‘Been mashing Mrs. Vansuythen as usual, eh? Bad thing for a sober, married man, that. What will Mrs. Boulte say?’ Boulte raised his head and said slowly, ‘Oh, you liar!’ Kurrell’s face changed. ‘What’s that?’ he asked quickly. ‘Nothing much,’ said Boulte. ‘Has my wife told you that you two are free to go off whenever you please? She has been good enough to explain the situation to me. You’ve been a true friend to me, Kurrell old man haven’t you?’ Kurrell groaned, and tried to frame some sort of idiotic sentence about being willing to give ‘satisfaction.’ But his interest in the woman was dead, had died out in the Rains, and, mentally, he was abusing her for her amazing indiscretion. It would have been so easy to have broken off the thing gently and by degrees, and now he was saddled with Boulte’s voice recalled him. ‘I don’t think I should get any satisfaction from killing you, and I’m pretty sure you’d get none from killing me.’ Then in a querulous tone, ludicrously disproportioned to his wrongs, Boulte added, ‘Seems rather a pity that you haven’t the decency to keep to the woman, now you’ve got her. You’ve been a true friend to her too, haven’t you?’ Kurrell stared long and gravely. The situation was getting beyond him. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. Boulte answered, more to himself than the questioner: ‘My wife came over to Mrs. Vansuythen’s just now; and it seems you’d been telling Mrs. Vansuythen that you’d never cared for Emma. I suppose you lied, as usual. What had Mrs. Vansuythen to do with you, or you with her? Try to speak the truth for once in a way.’ Kurrell took the double insult without wincing, and replied by another question: ‘Go on. What happened?’ ‘Emma fainted,’ said Boulte simply. ‘But, look here, what had you been saying to Mrs. Vansuythen?’