‘At the end of twenty-four hours, rather,’ said Cheswardine grimly.

‘Not one,’ said Woodruff.

‘But that’s absurd,’ Vera objected, disturbed.  When these two men began their philosophical discussions they always succeeded in disturbing her.  She hated to see life in a queer light.  She hated to think.

‘It isn’t absurd,’ Woodruff replied.  ’It simply shows that what prevents wholesale murder is not the wickedness of it, but the fear of being found out, and the general mess, and seeing the corpse, and so on.’

Vera shuddered.

‘And I’m not sure,’ Woodruff proceeded, ’that murder is so very much more wicked than lots of other things.’

‘Usury, for instance,’ Cheswardine put in.

‘Or bigamy,’ said Woodruff.

’But an Englishman couldn’t kill a mandarin in China by just wishing it,’ said Vera, looking up.

‘How do we know?’ said Woodruff, in his patient voice.  ’How do we know?  You remember what I was telling you about thought-transference last week.  It was in Borderland.’

Vera felt as if there was no more solid ground to stand on, and it angered her to be plunging about in a bog.

‘I think it’s simply silly,’ she remarked.  ‘No, thanks.’

She said ‘No, thanks’ to her husband, when he tendered his glass.

He moved the glass still closer to her lips.

‘I said “No, thanks,"’ she repeated dryly.

‘Just a mouthful,’ he urged.

‘I’m not thirsty.’

‘Then you’d better go to bed,’ said he.

He had a habit of sending her to bed abruptly.  She did not dislike it.  But she had various ways of going.  Tonight it was the way of an archduchess.

II

Woodruff, in stating that Vera was all nerves that evening, was quite right.  She was.  And neither her husband nor Woodruff knew the reason.

The reason had to do most intimately with frocks.

Vera had been married ten years.  But no one would have guessed it, to watch her girlish figure and her birdlike ways.  You see, she was the only child in the house.  She often bitterly regretted the absence of offspring to the name and honour of Cheswardine.  She envied other wives their babies.  She doted on babies.  She said continually that in her deliberate opinion the proper mission of women was babies.  She was the sort of woman that regards a cathedral as a place built especially to sit in and dream soft domestic dreams; the sort of woman that adores music simply because it makes her dream.  And Vera’s brown studies, which were frequent, consisted chiefly of babies.  But as babies amused themselves by coming down the chimneys of all the other houses in Bursley, and avoiding her house, she sought comfort in frocks.  She made the best of herself.  And it was a good best.  Her figure was as near perfect as a woman’s can be, and then there were