While Louis was so weak and ill Marcella came to several conclusions.  The first was that they must leave Sydney at once; the second was that Louis must be made to work if he would not be persuaded to work willingly.  In work, it seemed to her now, lay his salvation much more than in imprisonment, even though she should have him imprisoned in a nursing home, under treatment.  And in getting away from Sydney lay her own salvation.  It was high summer; the heat to her, after the cool exhilaration of the Highlands, was terrific; very often the thermometer she borrowed from Dutch Frank’s bedroom registered a hundred and twenty degrees in their room, and the close intimacy of life in one room was becoming appalling to her.  While he was in bed she was happy in a purely negative way; very soon happiness came to mean to her the state of quiescence when he was not drunk.  They had cleared up many things, and though she was glad to have got to the bedrock of truth about him at last she was sick with disillusionment, and a self-disgust at having been so credulous, so easily deceived.  In the state of chronic depression reactive to his orgy he let out all the truth about himself in a passion of self-indulgent penitence.  His tales of secret service were, he told her, not technically lies.  They were the delusions of his deranged mind.  He had read a spy book in England just before meeting her, when he was recovering from a similar orgy; it had made a dint on his brain similar to the impression left by the French girl earlier.  In the same way he explained his morbid tales of Chinese tortures—­once, in a fit of melancholy, he had attempted suicide, and after his recovery had gone to the seaside with his mother to recuperate; in the boarding-house had been a collection of books on atrocities.  It seemed that everything he read or saw when in a state of physical relaxation affected him psychologically.  Marcella did not realize this, however, until long afterwards.

The tales he had told her about his parentage he was inclined to treat with amusement.

“Don’t you know, darling, that that’s the first thing a man says when he’s crazed with any sort of delirium?  Either his mother’s honour or some other woman’s goes by the board.  I just had a variant on that theme—­that’s all.”

She was silent for a while, crushed.

“And then the things you said to me, Louis.  About me and—­that awful Mr. King and old Hop Lee who brings the fruit.  They are simply unforgivable.  Louis, I’ll do all I can to help you, my dear, but I’m finished with you.  You sneered at me because you knew I liked to kiss you.  Nothing on earth can ever make me do it again.”