“If it was that,” she said ambiguously, “you had better have held your tongue.  You had only to gain——­ Ah, why did you do it?  What was the good?”

He made another gesture of lassitude; then, rousing himself, he remarked: 

“It was a calculation, then, a piece of simple arithmetic.  If it gives her a little peace a little longer, why should three persons suffer—­be sacrificed—­when two might serve?”

“Oh, him!” cried the girl scornfully; “he can’t suffer—­he hasn’t a heart!”

Rainham looked up at her at last.  His fingers ceased playing with his ring.

“Oh, let me count for a little,” he murmured, with a little, ghastly laugh.

The girl’s eyes looked full into his, and in a moment they shone out of her face, which was suffused with a rosy flush that made her almost beautiful, with the illumination of some transcendent idea.

“Ah, you are a gentleman!” she cried.

In the tension of their nerves they were neither aware that the cab had come to a standstill, and before he could prevent her, she had stooped swiftly down and caught his hand passionately to her lips.

“Heaven forgive me!  How unhappy you must be!” she said.

CHAPTER XXV

After all, things were not so complicated as they seemed.  For Kitty was nearly at the end of her troubles; her trivial little life, with its commonplace tale of careless wrong and short-lived irony of suffering, telling with the more effect on a nature at once so light and so wanting in buoyancy, was soon to be hurried away and forgotten, amid the chaos of things broken and ruined.

“I don’t want to die,” she said, day after day, to the sternly cheerful nurse who had her in charge at the quiet, sunny hospital in the suburbs, where Rainham had gained admission for her as in-patient.  “But I don’t know that I want to live, either.”

And so it had been from the beginning, poor soul, poor wavering fatalist! with a nature too innately weak to make an inception either of good or evil, the predestined prey of circumstance.

As she lay in the long, white room dedicated to those stricken, like herself, with the disease that feeds on youth, her strength ebbing away quite painlessly, she often entered upon the pathless little track of introspection, a pathetic, illogical summing up of the conduct of her life, which always led so quickly to the same broad end of reassurance, followed by unreasoned condemnation—­the conventional judgement on her very inability to discover where she had so gravely sinned, how and when she had earned the extreme penalty of reprobation and of death.  She was too wicked, she concluded hopelessly, vaguely struggling with the memories of the teaching of her Sunday-school, too wicked to find out wherein her exceeding wickedness lay.