men.  It was just as it was when Arthur died.  I couldn’t do anything for him, and he was in agony:  he was shot through the stomach:  it didn’t seem to matter then that he had robbed me of Lizzie.  I couldn’t even get him a drop of water to drink.  He died hard, did Rendell.  It wasn’t true, what Lizzie said.  I’d have given my life for him.  But I couldn’t even make it easy for him to go.”

“Poor Rendell,” said Isabel softly, “and poor you!  Oh, I’m so sorry—­I’m so sorry!”

She was not afraid of Hyde now nor shy of him, she felt only an immense pity for him—­this man who for no conceivable reason and without the slightest warning had flung the weight of his terrible past on her young shoulders.  She longed to comfort him.  But he was inaccessibly far away, isolated, his voice rapid and hard and clear, his manner normal:  every nerve stripped bare but still rigid.  Inexperienced as she was, Isabel had a shrewd idea of his immediate need.  She took up the ring that Lawrence had wrenched off and slipped it on his finger again.

“Don’t do that,” said Lawrence starting:  “why do you do that?”

“But I shall love to see you wear it,” said Isabel.  “It’s the sign that you’ve forgiven them both.”

“Have I?”

“Of course you have.  You loved them too much not to forgive.”

“It is true.  But I hate myself for it,” said Lawrence.  “I hate your etiolated Christian ethics.  I don’t believe in the forgiveness of sins.  The complaisant husband, O God!  If I’d had the spirit of a man, I should have shot Arthur the night—­that night—. . . .

“But you loved him,” said Isabel, “and your wife too.  You felt revenge and hate and passion, but love was stronger:  and love is nobler than hate.  They betrayed you, but you never betrayed them.  It wasn’t unmanly of you, it was defeat and dishonour for them, not for you, when Rendell, after that great wrong he had done you, when you tried to make it easy for him to go.”

“May I—?” said Lawrence.

He leaned his face down on her open palms, and she felt the tears that she could not see.  He could not control them, and indeed after the first racking agony, when he felt as though his will were being torn out of him by the roots, he made no effort to control them, releasing Isabel and dropping at full length upon the turf.  Nothing else, no torment of his own thoughts, not Rendell’s last pangs nor his wife’s beauty young again in death had ever made Hyde weep:  if Rendell had died hard, Lawrence had lived equally hard, locking up his frightful trouble in his own breast, escaping from it when he could, cursing it and fighting against it when it threatened to overpower him.  But now he surrendered to it and acknowledged to himself that it had broken his life.  And he felt no shame, not one iota, nothing but a profound soulagement:  the proud reticent man, too vain to shed tears in his own room alone, wept voluntarily before Isabel, uncovering for her pity the wounds not only of grief but of rage and humiliation.