“Yes; I have heard that you were her lover.”

“I assure you I never was; we have not even been on good terms for a long time past.”

“You said just now that the act was generally preceded by a state of feeling long preparing.  It was you who taught her to read Schopenhauer.”

“I am not going to listen to nonsense at this hour of the morning.  I never take nonsense on an empty stomach.  Come, Thompson, you are going my way.”

Mike and Frank walked home together.  The clocks had struck six, and the milkmen were calling their ware; soon the shop-shutters would be coming down, and in this first flush of the day’s enterprise, a last belated vegetable-cart jolted towards the market.  Mike’s thoughts flitted from the man who lay a-top taking his ease, his cap pulled over his eyes, to the scene that was now taking place in the twilight bedroom.  What would Seymour say?  Would he throw himself on his knees?  Frank spoke from time to time; his thoughts growled like a savage dog, and his words bit at his friend.  For Mike had incautiously given an account in particular detail of his tete-a-tete with Lady Helen.

“Then you are in a measure answerable for her death.”

“You said just now that Harding was answerable; we can’t both be culpable.”

Frank did not reply.  He brooded in silence, losing all perception of the truth in a stupid and harsh hatred of those whom he termed the villains that ruined women.  When they reached Leicester Square, to escape from the obsession of the suicide, Mike said—­

“I do not think that I told you that I have sketched out a trilogy on the life of Christ.  The first play John, the second Christ, the third Peter.  Of course I introduce Christ into the third play.  You know the legend.  When Peter is flying from Rome to escape crucifixion, he meets Christ carrying His cross.”

“Damn your trilogy—­who cares!  You have behaved abominably.  I want you to understand that I cannot—­that I do not hold with your practice of making love to every woman you meet.  In the first place it is beastly, in the second it is not gentlemanly.  Look at the result!”

“But I assure you I am in no wise to blame in this affair.  I never was her lover.”

“But you made love to her.”

“No, I didn’t; we talked of love, that was all.  I could see she was excited, and hardly knew what she was saying.  You are most unjust.  I think it quite as horrible as you do; it preys upon my mind, and if I talk of other things it is because I would save myself the pain of thinking of it.  Can’t you understand that?”

The conversation fell, and Mike thrust both hands into the pockets of his overcoat.

At the end of a long silence, Frank said—­

“We must have an article on this—­or, I don’t know—­I think I should like a poem.  Could you write a poem on her death?”

“I think so.  A prose poem.  I was penetrated with the modern picturesqueness of the room—­the Venetian blinds.”