art. This fresh knowledge affected him in
two ways. On the one hand it gave breath to the selfish passion which
now dominated his ideas. At the same time, however it assured him
that when he asked his question: "Why did you not send for me?" an
unassailable answer would be forthcoming; and, moreover, by convincing
him of this, it destroyed the sole excuse he had pleaded to himself
for claiming the right to ask it. In self-defence Hilton had recourse
to his old outcry against the marriage laws and, finding this barren,
came in the end to frankly devising schemes for their circumvention.
Such inward personal conflicts were, of necessity, strange to a man
dry-nursed on abstractions, and, after a night of tension, they tossed
him up on the shores of the morning broken in mind and irresolute for
good or ill.

* * * * *

Mrs. Branscome received him impassively at the appointed time. David
saw that he was expected to speak to the point, and a growing scorn
for his own insistence urged him to the same course. He plunged
abruptly into his subject and his manner showed him in the rough, more
particularly to himself.

"What I came back to ask you is just this. You know--you must
know--that I would have come, whatever the consequence. Why did you
not send for me after, after--?"

"Why did I not send for you?" Mrs. Branscome took him up, repeating
his words mechanically, as though their meaning had not reached her.
"You don't mean that you never received my letter. Oh, don't say that!
It can't have miscarried, I registered it."

"Then you did write?"

This confirmation of her fear drove a breach through her composure.

"Of course, of course, I wrote," she cried. "You doubt that? What can
you think of me? Yes, I wrote, and when no answer came, I fancied
you had forgotten me--that you had never really cared, and so I--I
married."

Her voice dried in her throat. The thought of this ruin of two lives,
made inevitable by a mistake in which neither shared, brought a sense
of futility which paralysed her.

The same idea was working in Hilton's mind, but to a different end. It
fixed the true nature of this woman for the first time clearly within
his recognition, and the new light blinded him. Before, his imagined
grievance had always coloured the picture; now, he began to realise
not only that she was no more responsible for the catastrophe than
himself, but that he must have stood in the same ligh