“It’s with you, Lawrence, that I have to do business.  You passed last night with my wife.”

The heavy voice was deadened out of all heat except grossness.  How had Clowes spent the last twelve hours?  In reliving over and over again his wife’s fall:  defiling her image and poisoning his own soul with emanations of a diseased mind, from which Selincourt, a straightforward sinner, would have turned in disgust.  Men of strong passions like Bernard need greater control than Bernard possessed to curb what they cannot indulge:  and a mind full of gross imagery was nature’s revenge on him for a love that had been to him “hungry, and barren, and sharp as the sea.”  But for the friend, the brother, and the lover it was difficult to grant him such allowances as would have been made by a physician.

“That’ll do,” said Lawrence, raising his hand.  “Your wife is innocent.  Send any one you like to the hotel—­private detective if you like—­and find out what rooms Miss Stafford and Laura had, or whether Selincourt and I stayed five minutes in the place after the ladies went upstairs.”

“So Laura said this morning.”

“There’s no loophole for suspicion.  I went back with Selincourt to his rooms and we sat up the rest of the night smoking and playing auction piquet.  He won about five pounds off me.  Ask him:  he’ll confirm it.”

“That’s what he came for, isn’t it?” Bernard smiled.  “My good chap, think I don’t know that if you gave him a five pound note to do it Selincourt would hold the door for you?”

Selincourt’s pale face was scarlet.  “I say she shall not return to him!” he broke out loudly.  “If this is a specimen of what he’ll say to us, what does he say to her?”

“No offence, no offence,’’ Bernard bore him down, insolent and jovial. “‘The Lord commended the unjust steward.’  I foresaw that Lawrence would lie through thick and thin, and if I’d given it a thought either way I should have known you’d be brought down to back him up.  And quite right too to stand by your sister—­the more so that all you Selincourts are as poor as Church rats and naturally don’t want your damaged goods back on your hands.  But don’t get huffy, keep calm like me.  You deny everything, Lawrence.  Quite right:  a man’s not worth his salt if he won’t lie to protect a woman.  Laura also denies everything.  Quite right again:  a woman’s bound to lie to save her reputation.  But the husband also has his natural function, which is to exercise a decent incredulity.  Perhaps it’s a bit difficult for you to enter into my feelings.  You’re none of you married men and you don’t know how it stings a man up when his wife makes him a—­ Hallo!”

“What?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Go on,” said Lawrence, flinging himself into a chair:  “if you have a point, come to it.  I’m pretty well sick of this.”

“So it seems,” said Bernard staring at him.  “Is it the good old-fashioned English word that you can’t stomach?  All right, after tonight I shan’t offend again.  That’s my point and I’m coming to it as fast as I can.  I won’t have any one of the lot of you near me again except Val:  I acquit him of complicity:  he probably believes Laura innocent.  Don’t you, Val?”