“Though I knew I’d lost you then, I knew I’d lost whisky too.  All the striving things that had made me up, you see, were lying in ruins, and the whisky seemed such a disgusting, ridiculous thing it wouldn’t fit in anywhere.  Like one of those jigsaw puzzles—­the whisky bit put all the rest out.  I felt a most blissful peacefulness ... like, I suppose, when a cancer is taken away after months of hellish pain.  You can’t imagine it!  It was just like those Salvation Army chaps you hear in the street sometimes talking about being at peace with God.  You can see they are, they look so beaming!  I felt like that.  Only God didn’t seem to come into it.  I was just at peace with myself.”

She nodded, and he went on slowly: 

“I’m not clear about the rest.  Having smashed me, you see, he began to put me together again.  I felt I could worship him—­that sounds rather like hot air, old girl, but it’s quite true” he added, reddening a little.  “He’d got rid of that bally cancer for me.”

“But how did you know—?”

“How do you know the sun has risen, dear?  How did that poor devil that was tearing himself in the tombs know that he need fear no more when Christ spoke to him?  How did the blind man know he could see?  I just don’t know, but it happened.  And Marcella, do you know what I did?  Lord—­it was awful.  I cried like anything, and asked him to give you back to me.  It came to me like a flash that I’d no right to you, that you and he were much righter for each other.  But I just couldn’t spare you.  More selfishness!  And it seemed I’d such a lot to make up to you.  He said:  ‘Are you sure you can take care of her now, Louis?’ I laughed.  It seemed such cool, calm impudence the way our positions were reversed.  He laughed too, and said:  ’Queer how we still look upon women as goods and chattels, isn’t it?’”

“You didn’t seem to take me into account much,” she said.

“Kraill answered for you in the surest possible way.  And then we started to come back to you.  He said an astonishing thing on the way back—­asked me if I’d read a book on ‘Dreams,’ by a German chap named Freud.  I said I left dreams and ‘Old Moore’s Almanac’ to housemaids and old ladies.  He laughed, and we talked about dreams.  He told me some of his—­rather racy ones.  I told him lots of mine—­those horrors I used to have, and all that.  And he kept nodding his head, and saying:  ‘Yes, I thought so.’  I’ve often wondered what he was getting at, or if he wasn’t getting at anything at all, but just simply changing a difficult subject—­like when he asked you to make that tea.”

“So that’s that,” he said at last, and talked of England.  Presently she surprised him by saying that she very much wanted to go to Sydney.

“Want to test me among pubs, old lady?  Well—­I am armed so strong in honesty that dangers are to me indifferent!  I can’t help swanking bits from ‘Julius Caesar,’ you know—­my only Shakespeare play!  But it’ll be great to go to Sydney.  Only—­what are we going for?  Shopping?”