“There was another fellow at Trinity who had been in the Sixth at Eton with me, a year older than I was, a very brilliant man and as hard as nails:  Rendell, his name was:  an athlete, a tophole centre-forward, with a fascinating Irish manner and blazing blue eyes.  To him I told my tale, because we were Damon and Pythias, and I couldn’t have kept a secret from him to save my life.  I was an ingenuous youngster in those days:  never was such a pal as my pal!  He saw me through my marriage and afterwards I took him with me once or twice to Myrtle Villa:  it may illuminate the situation if I say that it made me all the prouder of Lizzie when I saw Rendell admired her:  never was such an idyll as my manage a trois!  Unluckily, one evening when I turned up unexpectedly I found them together.”

“Oh! . . .  What did you do?”

“Nothing.  There was nothing to be done.  I wasn’t going to ruin myself by divorcing her.  Luckily the war broke out and Rendell and I both enlisted the next day.  He was killed fighting by my side at Neuve Chapelle, and I had the job of breaking the news to Lizzie.  She was royally angry, poor Lizzle:  told me I had no right to be alive when a better man than myself was dead.  I agreed:  Rendell was—­the better man, though he didn’t behave well to me.  He died better than he lived.  Out there it didn’t seem to matter much.  He died in my arms.”

“Did you forgive your wife?”

“I never lived with her again, if that’s what you mean.  If I had been willing, which I wasn’t, she never would have consented.  She had the rather irrational prejudices of her type and class, and persisted in regarding me, or professing to regard me, as answerable for Rendell’s death.  It wasn’t true,” said Lawrence, turning his eyes on Isabel without any attempt to veil their agony.  “If I’d meant to shoot him I should have shot him to his face.  But I’d have saved him if I could.  How on earth could any one do anything in such a hell as Neuve Chapelle?  That week every officer in my company was either killed or wounded.  But Lizzie had no imagination.  She couldn’t get beyond the fact that I was alive and he was dead.”

“What became of her?”

“I’m sorry to say she went to the bad.  She had money from both of us, but she spent it in public houses—­didn’t seem to care what happened to her after losing Arthur:  a wretched life:  it ended last January with her death from pneumonia after measles.  That was what brought me back to England; I couldn’t stand coming home before.”

“Was it a relief when she died?”

“No, I was sorry,” said Hyde.  His wide black eyes, devil-driven beyond reticence, were riveted on Isabel’s:  apparently she no longer existed for him except as the Chorus before whom he could strip himself of the last rag of his reserve.  “It brought it all back.  I was besotted when I married her, and I remembered all that when I saw her dead.  I forgot the other