She regarded him with whimsical pity. “Oh yes, I like her,” she said. “Then why not keep her to yourself? I am not bound by Hammersley’s wishes. All I have to do is to decline to act either as executor or trustee.” Clementina’s heart leaped in the most unregenerate manner. To have Sheila all to herself, without let or hindrance from her impossible co-trustee! She was staggered by the sudden, swift temptation which struck at the roots of her unfulfilled womanhood. For a while she dallied with it deliciously. “If it’s agreeable to you, I’ll decline to act,” said Quixtus, after the spell of silence. Clementina strangled the serpent in a flash and cast it from her. To purchase happiness at the price of human infirmity? No. She would play squarely with life. Feminine instinct told her that the care of the child was needful for this weary man’s salvation. She attacked him with more roughness than she intended—the eddy of her own struggle. “What right have you to shirk your responsibilities? That’s what you’ve always done—and see where it has landed you. I’m not going to be a party to it. It’s pure and simple cowardice, and I have no patience with it.” “Perhaps I deserve your reproaches,” said Quixtus mildly. “But the present circumstances are so painful——” “Painful!” she interrupted. “Lord above, man, what does it matter whether they’re painful or not? Do you suppose I’ve gone through six and thirty years without pain? I’ve had awful pain, hellish pain, as much pain as a woman and an artist and a scarecrow can suffer. That’s new to you, isn’t it? But you’ve never seen me making a hullabaloo about it. We’ve got to bear pain in the world, and the more we grin, the better we bear it, and—what is a precious sight more useful—the more we help others to bear it. Who are you, Ephraim Quixtus, that you should be exempt from pain?” She turned to the yellow packet of “Maryland” on the marble mantlepiece and rolled a cigarette. Quixtus said nothing, but sat tugging at his scrubby moustache. “That child,” she said—and she paused to lick the cigarette—“That child of five is doomed to pain. Some of it all the love in the world can’t prevent. It’s a law of life. But some it can. That’s another law of life, thank God. By taking pain upon us, we can also save others pain. That’s another law. I suppose we have to thank Jesus Christ for that. And fate has put this tender thing into our hands to save it, if possible, from the pain that both you and I have endured. To reject the privilege is the act of a cowardly devil, not of a man.” As she stood there in her slatternly blouse and tousled hair, brandishing the wetted cigarette between nicotine stained fingers, yet enunciating as she had seldom condescended to do to a fellow creature her ruggedly tender philosophy of life, she looked almost beautiful in the eyes of the man who had awakened from a nightmare into the sober greyness of an actual dawn.