“‘By Heaven, I’m not!’ His lips just moved. He looked like a statue conceived in madness, carved with scorn. “‘I grant some one has to go’--she was apparently trying to be extraordinarily generous--‘but why he? It’s not his place or his life. It’s not what he’s fit for. It’s not asked of him. He has me; he has Virginia. Virginia!’ She had turned to me, her shoulder blotting out Dorrien. It seemed that they had to communicate through me; they had ceased to address each other. ‘Has he a right,’ she went on, ‘to take us to a place like that? Has a husband, a father, no responsibilities? Even if I don’t matter, must Virginia live and die among those monsters?’ “How could I say, I ask you, that Virginia must? I had never seen Virginia. I had nothing to do with these people. Why didn’t they see that? I don’t believe, you know, that they ever saw it. I might have been Rhadamanthus in a poor disguise. “Mrs. Dorrien stopped, and cried quietly into her handkerchief. Her husband took up the talk. “‘God knows I’ve wasted life long enough. It’s a chance in a million, man--the one chance in the whole world. Give me ten years there, and I’ll know, I tell you. I’ll find a cure. I’ll track the filthy germ. I’ve never had half a show, pulling old ladies through bronchitis. It’s no work for a man. I’ve been ashamed to look at myself in a glass for two years. I’ve gone a little way; I swear I’m on the right track. It’s the kind of thing I can do. I haven’t a bedside manner; Agatha has that. Those poor wretches don’t need a bedside manner. They need some one to avenge them. She’s ambitious. Well, let her give me my head for ten years, and she can cover herself with my medals. We’ll come back, when I’ve done my work, and she can queen it all over Europe.’ “He was incoherent, overweening, inconsequent, but terrifyingly in earnest. More probably than not, she would have a suicide on her hands, I thought, if she did take him home. It didn’t look as if she would get him past Suez. “Mrs. Dorrien sat with her hands folded in her lap, breathing hard, but quite silent. They were appalling, that pair. I’d have given a good deal to hear a little repartee just then. But the mortal insult would have been to suggest that either one should speak to the other. The queerest night I ever spent, and I’ve been through some I didn’t believe in, myself, the next day. Well, all I wanted was to have it over; I didn’t care how brutally I hastened it. “‘Why don’t you go alone?’ “He looked at me then; he had only spoken to me before. Dominated by that look, I began to piece together my own scraps of traveller’s knowledge. Then I kicked myself. I didn’t need all the unphraseable explanations that gathered silently in his eyes. I knew, of course, what he just refrained from replying. It was the last leash on him--the thinnest thread of control. If that snapped, if I jerked it, we should be saying, all three of us together, monstrous things. I held hard on the leash.