This time Mrs. Clarke looked almost strongly surprised.

“What did you talk about?” she asked.

“Chiefly about a book he seems to have been reading recently, Richard Burton’s ‘Kasidah.’  You know it, of course?”

“I remember Omar Khayyam much better.”

“He spoke strangely, almost terribly about it.  Perhaps you know how converts to Roman Catholicism talk in the early days of their conversion, as if they alone understood the true meaning of being safe in sunlight, cradled and cherished in the blaze, as it were.  Well, he spoke like one just converted to a belief in the all-sufficiency of this life if it is thoroughly lived; and, I confess, he gave me the impression of being cradled and cherished in thick darkness.”

Sir Carey was silent for a moment.  Then he said: 

“What was this man, Leith?”

“Do you mean——?”

“Before his married life came to an end?”

“The straight, athletic, orthodox young Englishman; very sane and simple, healthily moral; not perhaps particularly religious, but full of sentiment and trust in a boyish sort of way.  I remember he read Christian morals into Greek art.”

Sir Carey raised his eyebrows.

“One could sum him up by saying that he absolutely believed in and exclusively adored a strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded and healthy-bodied Englishwoman, who has now, I believe, entered a sisterhood, or something of the kind.  She colored his whole life.  He saw life through her eyes, and believed through her faith.  At least, I should think so.”

“Then he’s an absolutely different man from what he was.”

“The strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded and bodied Englishwoman has condemned as a crime a mere terrible mistake.  She has taken herself away from her husband and given herself to God.  She cared for the child.”

Mrs. Clarke laid a curious cold emphasis on the last sentence.

“Horrible!” said Sir Carey slowly.  “And so now he turns from the Protestant’s God to Destiny playing with the pawns upon the great chessboard.  But if he’s a man of sentiment, and not an intellectual, he’ll never find this life all-sufficient, however he lives it.  The darkness will never be enough for him.”

“It has to be enough for a great many of us,” said Mrs. Clarke.

There was a long pause, which she broke by saying, in a lighter voice: 

“As he’s going to visit you, I can go on having him here.  You’ll let people know, won’t you?”

“That he’s a friend of ours?  Of course.”

“That will make things all right.”

“You run your unconventionalities always on the public race-course, in sight of the grand stand packed with the conventionalities.”

“What else can I do?  Besides, secret things are always found out.”

“You never went in for them.”

“And yet my own husband misunderstood me.”