"There's something in that," he replied; and, after thanking me for my advice, he left me. I do not defend my plan. I admit it was Machiavellian. My one desire was to remove these two dear people from Wellingsford for a season. Just think of the horrible impossibility of their maintaining social relations with the Boyces .... By publicly honouring Boyce, Sir Anthony had tied his own hands. It was a pledge to Boyce, although the latter did not know it, of condonation. Whatever stories Gedge might spread abroad, whatever proofs he might display, Sir Anthony could take no action. But to carry on a semblance of friendship with the man responsible for his daughter's death--for the two of them, mind you, since Lady Fenimore would sooner or later learn everything--was, as I say, horribly impossible. Let them go, then, on their nominal holiday, during which the air might clear. Boyce might take his mother away from Wellingsford. She would do far more than uproot herself from her home in order to gratify a wish of her adored and blinded son. He would employ his time of darkness in learning to be brave, he had told me. It took some courage to face the associations of dreadful memories unflinchingly, for his mother's sake. Should he learn, however, that the Fenimores had an inkling of the truth, he would recognise his presence in the place to be an outrage. And such inkling--who would give it him? Perhaps I, myself. The Boyces would go--the Fenimores could return. Anything, anything rather than that the Fenimores and the Boyces should continue to dwell in the same little town. And there was Betty--with all the inexplicable feminine whirring inside her--socially reconciled with Boyce. Where the deuce was this reconciliation going to lead? I have told you how my lunatic love for Betty had stood revealed to me. Had she chosen to love and marry any ordinary gallant gentleman, God knows I should not have had a word to say. The love that such as I can give a woman can find its only true expression in desiring and contriving her happiness. But that she should sway back to Leonard Boyce--no, no. I could not bear it. All the shuddering pictures of him rose up before me, the last, that of him standing by the lock gates and suddenly running like a frightened rabbit, with his jaunty soft felt hat squashed shapelessly over his ears. Gedge could not have invented that abominable touch of the squashed hat.