Now he felt only disgust and horror.  Norah’s ignorance and disregard of moral precepts, or readiness to yield to the snares of unlicensed joy, were summed up in the better and truer word innocence.  The greater her weakness, the greater his wickedness.  If he could not save her from others, he could save her from himself.  Then if she fell, it would at least be a natural fall.  It would not be a foul betrayal of youth by age; it would not be the sort of degraded crime that makes angels weep, and ordinary people change into judges and executioners.

When a man has reached a certain time of life he must not crave for forbidden delights, he must not permit himself to be eaten up with new desire, he must not risk destroying a girl’s soul for the gratification of his own body.  If he does, he commits the unpardonable sin.  And there is no excuse for him.

The Devil’s reasonings to which a few minutes ago he had listened greedily were specious, futile, utterly false.  That sort of argument might do for other men—­might do for every other man in the wide world—­but it would not do for him, William Dale.  Its acceptance would knock the very ground from under his feet.

For, if there could be any excuse, why had he killed Everard Barradine?

XXX

Then Dale lived again for the hundred thousandth time in the thoughts and passions of that distant period.

The forest glade grew dim, vanished.  He was lying on the grass in a London park, and Mavis’ confession rang through the buzzing of his ears, through the chaos of his mind.  It seemed that the whole of his small imagined world had gone to pieces, and the immensity of the real world had been left to him in exchange—­crushing him with an idea of its unexplored vastness, of its many countries, its myriad races.  And yet, big as it all was, it could not provide breathing space for that man and himself.

Soon this became an oppressive certainty.  Life under the new conditions had been rendered unendurable.  And then there grew up the one solid determination, that he must stand face to face with his enemy and call him to account.  It must at last be man to man.  He must tell the man what he thought of him, call him filthy names, strip him of every shred of dignity—­and strike him.  A few blows of scorn might suffice—­a backhander across the snout, a few swishes with a stick, a kick behind when he turned.  He was too rottenly weak a thing to fight with.

His mind refused to go further than this.  However deeply and darkly it was working below the surface of consciousness, it gave him no further directions than this.

He got rid of his wife.  That was the first move in the game—­anyhow.  He did not want to think about her now; she would be dealt with again later on.  At present he wished to concentrate all his attention on the other one.