“I didn’t think you loved me,” she murmured.

“I don’t believe I did—­till Kraill gave me a few tips!  You see, I went roaring off to him, and he was standing by a tree looking stunned.  I was flaring, frantic.  I called him a damned adulterer.  He laughed at me, and said just what you said, ‘If I’m not better than that, she is!’ Then he told me that I’d deliberately thrown you away.  Mad as I was with him, I saw that he was quite right.”

He paused, and puffed at his cigarette.

“Lord, it was a set-out, Marcella!  He said quite calmly, that he was going to take you.  Then it was I saw what life without you would be.  He gave me a thumb-nail sketch of myself—­and of you and him.  You both seemed rather fine.  I seemed a stinking, grovelling, strawy sort of thing.  To my amazement it seemed right that he should have you.  Lord, it scorched!  I stopped thinking about killing him, and wanted to kill myself.”

She put out her hand to him silently and he took it in his.

“Then, quite unexpectedly, he asked me if I was happy.  Happy!  In that strife!  I found myself telling him—­and I’d just called him a damned adulterer, mind!—­all about it, the awful fighting, the awful losing, and the hunger.  And I knew he would understand all of it.  He said he’d had just such hungers, and had got through with them.  He said the getting through came to different people in different ways.  He said something I want to have framed up in the sky for miserable neurotics to read, Marcella.  He said, ’With you, Louis, it’s got to be drastic.  It’s got to be an earthquake.  There’s more than the drink in you that’s got to be rooted out.  All the foundations of you, all the structure of you, have to crumble, to fall together in a heap.  Your spiritual centre of gravity has got to shift.  Do you see?’ I didn’t see.  But that’s the very most important thing, Marcella—­about the centre of gravity.”

She nodded.  She thought she understood.

“Then he gave me another, gentler picture of myself—­a fight here, a failure there, a hunger somewhere else, and Lord knows how many old shreds of cynicism and belief, of selfishness and ambition and wantonness and pride, and just a little bit of love and desire for beauty.  I told him that madness of mine, about the Mater’s letters that I told you to take to King George.  He was interested in that—­said it was symbolical of my love for the Mater.  I think I told him every bally thing in my life.  And I never lied once to him.  He was quiet a bit, and then he said I’d to be shaken up, smashed and crumbled, so that these old things would all go from me, and new things come in by the crevices and let the axis of me get changed.  That seemed reasonable.  What was so queer was how he treated me like a kid.  Rather an intelligent kid, you know.  He said:  ’Did you, at school, Louis, have the lamp and orange and hatpin trick to explain night and day to you?’ I said yes, and it all came back to me, being a kid in school