“Go on,” he said gently and firmly.  “As priest or man, Mr. O’Day, I am ready.”

Felix paused; the priest bent his head in closer attention.  He was accustomed to halting confessions, and ready with a prompting word if the sinner faltered.

“It is about my wife.”

The words seemed to choke him, as if the grip of a long-held silence had not yet quite relaxed its hold.

“Not ill, I hope?”

“No, she is not ill.”

The priest leaned forward, a startled look on his face.  “You surely don’t mean she is dead?”

O’Day did not answer.

Father Cruse settled back into the depths of his chair.  “She has left you, then,” he said in a conclusive tone.

“Yes—­a year ago.”

He stopped, started to speak, and, with a baffled gesture, said:  “No, you might better have it all.  It is the only way you will understand; I will begin at the beginning.”

The priest laid his hand soothingly on O’Day’s wrist.  “Take your time.  I have nothing else to do except to listen and—­help you if I can.”

The touch of the priest had steadied him.  “Thank you, Father,” he said simply, and went on.

“A year ago, as I have said, my wife left me and went off with a man named Dalton.  Later I learned she was here, and I came over to see what I could do to help her.”

Father Cruse raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Yes, just that—­to help her when she needed help, for I knew she would need it sooner or later.  She was not a bad woman when she left me, and she is not now, unless he has made her so.  She is only an easily persuaded, pleasure-loving woman, and when my father was forced into bankruptcy and we all suffered together, she blamed me for giving up what money I had in trying to straighten out his affairs; and then our infant daughter died, and that so upset her mind that when Dalton came along she let everything go.  That is one solution of it—­the one which her friends give out.  I will tell you the truth.  It is that I was twenty years older than she, that she loved me as a young girl loves an older man who had been brought up almost in her own family, for our properties adjoined, and that when she woke up, it was to find out that I was not the man she would have married had she been given a few more years’ time in which to make up her mind.

“When she ran away I lost my bearings.  I used to sit in my room in the club for hours at a time, staring at the morning paper, never seeing the print; thinking only of my wife and our life together—­all of it, from the day we were married.  I recalled her childish nature, her fits of sudden temper always ending in tears, and her wilfulness.  Then my own responsibility loomed up.  To let this child go to the devil would be a crime.  When this idea became firmly set in my mind, I determined to follow her no matter what she had done or where she had gone.

“I had meant to go to Australia and look after sheep—­I knew something about them—­but I changed my plans when I overheard a conversation at my club and concluded that Dalton had brought her here—­ although the conversation itself was only the repetition of a rumor.  Since then I have found out that they are both here, or were some six months ago.