ger carnivores began to change. Except for the repetition of
accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of
the word. They dealt chiefly with the "Cub," and even there Benham felt
presently that the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing quality for
Amanda appeared--triteness. The very writing of her letters changed
as though it had suddenly lost backbone. Her habitual liveliness
of phrasing lost its point. Had she lost her animation? Was she ill
unknowingly? Where had the light gone? It was as if her attention was
distracted.... As if every day when she wrote her mind was busy about
something else.

Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had never been stated,
never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
perceived to be THERE....

He left a record of that moment of realization.

"Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had
never seen Amanda before. Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that
same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a
scientific distinctness that has neither light nor shadow....

"Of course," I said, and then presently I got up very softly....

"I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin. I wanted
to feel the largeness of the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off
the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back
to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the
coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish
of the black water against the side of the ship. And a perception of
infinite loss, as if the limitless heavens above this earth and below
to the very uttermost star were just one boundless cavity from which
delight had fled....

"Of course I had lost her. I knew it with absolute certainty. I knew it
from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it
from every line she had written me in the last three months. I knew it
intuitively. She had been unfaithful. She must have been unfaithful.

"What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?"

21

"Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters. Let me
be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may
have been led into by force of my passions. Always I have despised
jealousy....

"Only by the conquest of four natural limi