“I enclose fifty ten-pound notes, as I suppose they will be quicker and easier for you to cash than those ‘draft’ things, and they’ll be quite safe in the insured packet.  Send a cable at once, Darling.  If you don’t I shall imagine awful things and perhaps die of a broken heart or some other silly trifle.

“Mind then:—­Cable to-day; Start to-morrow; Get here in a fortnight—­and keep a beady eye open at Port Said and Brindisi and places—­in case there has been time for me to get there.  Au revoir.  Darling Dam,

  “Your

  “LUCILLE.

  “Three cheers!  And a million more!”

* * * * *

Yes, a long letter, but he could almost say it backwards.  He couldn’t be anything like mad while he could do that?...  How had she received his answer—­in which he tried to show her the impossibility of any decent man compromising a girl in the way she proposed in her sweet innocence and ignorance.  Of course he, a half-mad, epileptic, fiend-ridden monomaniac—­nay, dangerous lunatic,—­could not marry.  Why, he might murder his own wife under some such circumstances as those under which he attacked Captain Blake. (Splendid fellow Blake!  Not every man after such a handling as that would make it his business to prove that his assailant was neither drunk, mad, nor criminal—­merely under a hallucination.  But for Blake he would now be in jail, or lunatic asylum, to a certainty.  The Colonel would have had him court-martialled as a criminal, or else have had him out of the regiment as a lunatic.  Nor, as a dangerous lunatic, would he have been allowed to buy himself out when Lucille’s letter and his money arrived.  Blake had got him into the position of a perfectly sober and sane person whose mind had been temporarily upset by a night of horror—­in which a coffin-quitting corpse had figured, and so he had been able to steer between the cruel rocks of Jail and Asylum to the blessed harbour of Freedom.)

Yes—­in spite of Blake’s noble goodness and help, Dam knew that he was not normal, that he was dangerous, that he spent long periods on the very border-line of insanity, that he stood fascinated on that border-line and gazed far into the awful country beyond—­the Realms of the Mad....

Marry!  Not Lucille, while he had the sanity left to say “No”!

As for going to live at Monksmead with her and Auntie Yvette—­it would be an even bigger crime.  Was it for him to make Lucille a “problem” girl, a girl who was “talked about,” a by-word for those vile old women of both sexes whose favourite pastime is the invention and dissemination of lies where they dare, and of even more damaging head-shakes, lip-pursings, gasps and innuendoes where they do not?