“You haven’t had the blow I have had.  I know I am not in fault.  I know I have nothing to blame myself for.  I wasn’t even careless with my gun.  If I had been I could never have forgiven myself.  But I wasn’t.”

“It was the pony.  I know.  I read the account of the inquest.  You were absolutely exonerated.”

“Yes.  The coroner and the jury expressed their deep sympathy with me,” he said, with intense bitterness.  “They realized how—­how I loved my little boy.  But the woman I loved more even than my boy, whom I had loved for ever since I first saw her—­well, she didn’t feel at all as the coroner and the jury did.”

“Where is she?  I hear now and then from Beatrice Daventry, but she never mentions her sister.”

“She is in Liverpool doing religious work, I believe.  She has given herself to religion.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“People give themselves to God, don’t they, sometimes?”

“Do they?” said Mrs. Clarke, with her curious grave directness, which seemed untouched by irony.

“It seems a way out of—­things.  But she always had a tendency that way.”

“Towards the religious life?”

“Yes.  She always cared for God a great deal more than she cared for me.  She cared for God and for Robin, and she seemed to be just beginning to care for me when I deprived her of Robin.  Since then she has hated me.”

He spoke quietly, sternly.  All the emotion of which she had been conscious on the previous afternoon had left him.

“I didn’t succeed in making her love me!” he continued.  “I thought I had gained a good deal in South Africa.  When I came back I felt I was starting again, and that I should carry things through.  Robin felt the difference in me directly.  He would have got to care for me very much, and I could have done a great deal for him when he had got older.  But God didn’t see things that way.  He had planned it all out differently.  When I was with her in Greece, one day I tore down a branch of wild olive and stripped the leaves from it.  She saw me do it, and it distressed her very much.  She had been dreaming over a child, and my action shattered her dream, I suppose.  Women have dreams men can’t quite understand—­about children.  She forgave me for that almost directly.  She knew I would never have done anything to make her unhappy even for a moment, if I had thought.  Now I have broken her life to pieces, and there’s no question of forgiveness.  If there were, I should not speak of her to you.  We are absolutely parted forever.  She would take the hand of the most dreadful criminal rather than my hand.  She has a horror of me.  I’m the thing that’s killed her child.”

He looked down at the dilapidated graves, and then at the lonely water which seemed trying to hide itself away in the recesses of the bare land.

“That’s how it is.  Robin forgave me.  He was alive for a moment—­after, and I saw by his eyes he understood.  Yes, he understood—­he understood!”