“You’re a Catholic,” she said.  “People say that you Catholics don’t mind this kind of thing—­me and the Major, I mean.”

There was a dreadful sort of sly suggestiveness about this remark that stung him.  He exploded:  and his wounded pride gave him bitterness.

“My good girl,” he said, “Catholics simply loathe it.  And even, personally, I think it’s beastly.”

“Well—­I ...”

“I think it’s beastly,” said Frank didactically.  “A good girl like you, well-brought-up, good parents, nice home, religious—­instead of which “—­he ended in a burst of ironical reminiscence—­“you go traveling about with a—­” he checked himself—­“a man who isn’t your husband.  Why don’t you marry him?”

“I can’t!” wailed Gertie, suddenly stricken again with remorse; “his wife’s alive.”

Frank jumped.  Somehow that had never occurred to him.  And yet how amazingly characteristic of the Major!

“Well—­leave him, then!”

“I can’t!” cried poor Gertie.  “I can’t!...  I can’t!”

CHAPTER IV

(I)

Frank awoke with a start and opened his eyes.

But it was still dark and he could see nothing.  So he turned over on the other side and tried to go to sleep.

The three of them had come to this little town last night after two or three days’ regular employment; they had sufficient money between them; they had found a quite tolerable lodging; they had their programme, such as it was, for the next day or so; and—­by the standard to which he had learned to adjust himself—­there was no sort of palpable cause for the horror that presently fell on him.  I can only conjecture that the origin lay within, not without, his personality.

The trouble began with the consciousness that on the one side he was really tired, and on the other that he could not sleep and, to clinch it, the knowledge that a twenty-mile walk lay before him.  He began to tell himself that sleep was merely a question of will—­of will deliberately relaxing attention.  He rearranged his position a little; shifted his feet, fitted himself a little more closely into the outlines of the bed, thrust one hand under the pillow and bade himself let go.

Then the procession of thoughts began as orderly as if by signal.

He found himself presently, after enumerating all the minor physical points of discomfort—­the soreness of his feet, the knobbiness of the bed, the stuffiness of the room in which the three were sleeping, the sound of the Major’s slow snoring—­beginning to consider the wisdom of the whole affair.  This was a point that he had not consciously yet considered, from the day on which he had left Cambridge.  The impetus of his first impulse and the extreme strength of his purpose had, up to the present—­helped along by novelty—­kept him going.  Of course, the moment had to come sooner or later; but it seems a little hard that he was obliged to face it in that peculiarly dreary clarity of mind that falls upon the sleepless an hour or two before the dawn.