“He must have seen the fire in the papers—­I hope he didn’t think what you did.  I mean—­think—­”

“What?”

“Think that I cared.”

“Don’t, Molly, for God’s sake!  I never thought it.  I was in an infernal bad temper, that was all.”

“So that hasn’t made any difference?”

“Of course it hasn’t.”

“Nothing can make any difference now then, can it?”

It was too much.  He got up and walked up and down the room.  Poor Mrs. Nevill Tyson, she had put his idea into words.  She had suggested that there was a difference, and suggestion is a fatal thing to an unsteady mind.  In that moment of fearful introspection he said to himself that it was all very well for her to say there was no difference.  There was a difference.  She was not exactly lying on a bed of roses; but in the nature of things her lot was easier than his.  There was no comparison between the man’s case and the woman’s.  He had not sunk into that serene apathy which is nine-tenths of a woman’s virtue.  He was not an invalid—­neither was he a saint.  It is not necessary to be a saint in order to be a martyr; poor devils have their martyrdom.  Why could not women realize these simple facts?  Why would they persist in believing the impossible?

His face was very red when he turned round and answered.  “I can’t talk about it, Molly.  God knows what I feel.”

This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.

He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the reading.  He sat and watched her.

Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman.  Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated its pallor and discoloration.  He was fascinated by the very horror of it; as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it start into relief again.  He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the nerves.  And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life.  He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal triumph of Fate.  Dead and not dead—­that was the horrible thing.  Beneath that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive.  She would live, she would be young when he was long past middle age.

He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage that had saved his life—­for that.  Of all her rash and inconsiderate actions this was the worst.  Courage had never formed part of his feminine ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have left it to men and to brutes like him.  And yet if that detestable “accident,” as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved him all the better for it.

Odd.  But some women are made so.  Marion Hathaway was that sort—­she stuck like a leech.