Myra, therefore, had come and gone without his knowledge. Often he wished that he had met her and wrung some information from her unwilling lips. And now, with his purpose accomplished, his heart aching for change, his spirit craving to pour itself out in tumultuous words, and his soul crying for her that was lost, the thought that had haunted the back of his mind for the past year stood out grimly spectre-wise. What right had he to live? Olifant had spoken truly. What right had he to compel her to perpetual widowhood that was no widowhood? She was tied to him, a husband lost, as far as she was concerned, to human ken, never to cross her path again; tied to him as much as Myra was tied to the poor wretch in the madhouse. And as Myra had grown soured and hard, so might Olivia grow. Olivia so young now, with all the joy of life before her. He gone, she could marry again. There was Olifant, that model of men, whom he guessed to have supplanted. With him she could be happy until her life’s end. Once more she could be Lady Bountiful of “The Towers.” . . . The conception was an agony of the flesh, keeping him awake of nights on the hard little camp-bed in the loft. He grappled with the torture, resolved to triumph over it, as he had gritted his teeth and triumphed over physical pain in hospitals. The knife was essential, he told himself. It was for her sake. It was his duty to put himself out of the world. And yet the days went on, and he felt the lust of life in his blood. The question tauntingly arose: Is it braver to die than to live? Is it more cowardly to live than to die? He couldn’t answer it. In the meantime he went on mending broken-down motor-engines and driving gay tourists about the countryside, in his car of resurrection. CHAPTER XXV WHAT was bound to happen had happened. Olifant the Galahad, out for grails, as Triona, and indeed as Olivia had pictured him, had lost his head, poured out a flow of mad words, and flung his arm about her and kissed her passionately. She had been caught, had half-surrendered; released, she had put hands to a tumultuous bosom and staggered away from him. And there had followed a scene enacted for the twenty-billionth time on the world’s stage. She had grown weak and strong by turns. At last she had said: “If you love me, go now and let me think it over and all that it means.” And he had gone, passion yielding to his courteous consideration of her, and she was left alone in the drawing-room, staring through the open French windows at the May garden.