“You don’t understand,” continued Rainham, after a slight pause in his thin, far-away voice.  “I am not thinking of him, or only indirectly.  I have found him out, and I should be content enough to forget him if it were possible.  Only, unfortunately, he happens to be inextricably entangled with all that is most sacred, most important to me.  It is of his wife—­Mrs. Lightmark:  do you know her?—­that I think.”

Oswyn shook his head.

“I know her only by sight, as we all do; she is very beautiful.”

“I don’t mind telling you that I have considered her a great deal—­yes, immensely.  I should not speak of it—­of her—­unless I were dying; but, after all, when one is dying, there are things one may say.  I have held my peace so long.  And since I have been lying here I have had time to ponder it, to have thought it all out.  It seems to me that simply for her sake someone should know before—­before the occasion passes—­just the plain truth.  Of course, Sylvester by rights ought to be the man, only I can’t ask him to come to me—­there are reasons; and, besides, he is an ass.”

“Yes, he is an ass,” admitted Oswyn simply; “that is reason enough.”

And just then there flashed into his mind the one notable occasion on which the barrister had run across him, his intriguing letter and the ineffectual visit which had followed it—­ineffectual as he had supposed, but which might nevertheless, he reflected now, have had its results, ironical and inopportune enough.  It was a memory of no importance, and yet it seemed just then to be the last of a long train of small lights that led to a whole torch of illumination, in which the existence of little Margot and her quaint juxtaposition with his friend, which in his general easy attitude towards the fantastic he had not troubled to investigate, was amply and generously justified.  He turned round suddenly, caught his friend’s thin hand, which he held.

“Ah, don’t trouble to explain, to make me understand,” he murmured.  “It’s enough that I understand you have done something very fine, that you are the most generous of men.”

Rainham was silent for a moment:  he had no longer the physical capacity of smiling; but there was a gleam of the old humour in his eyes, as he replied: 

“Only the most fortunate—­in my friends; they are so clever, they see things so quickly.  You make this very easy.”

Oswyn did not shift for a while from his position:  he was touched, moved more deeply than he showed; and there was a trace of emotion in his voice—­of something which resembled envy.

“The happy woman!  It is she who ought to know, to understand.”