a kind of peace-offering. Not to be ungracious, he roused
himself to a show of interest. "Couldn't make her! Surely you weren't
so cruel as to try?"

"Here's your hanky," she said, tossing the moist, scrunched ball across
to him. "Cruel! We didn't mean to be cruel. I suppose we were. She used
to ask us to try. There was a game we played; we called it Christian
Martyrs. She was always the martyr; she liked it. All she ever did when
we hurt her was to say, 'Do it harder; I can bear more than that.' She
was as proud then as she is to-day of all that she could bear. I think
that's what made her husband furious. She seemed always to be saying to
him, 'Do it harder,' and he certainly did. But neither he nor any one
else has ever succeeded in making her cry."

Tabs glanced at the aloof beauty of the painted face--it was like the
face of a Roman Empress, so proudly secure in its serenity. "Make her
cry! Why should any one want to make her cry? To do that would be a kind
of blasphemy."

"That's why," Maisie clasped her hands eagerly. "You've said it for me
exactly. I've never known how to put it. It's the holiness of God that
tempts men to revile Him. He evades them, outlasts them and yet compels
their affection. They have no power over Him and can't destroy Him,
though they can destroy everything else in the world. What a man loves
and has no power over, he longs to destroy; either that, or to drag it
down to his own level, so that he can get his arms round it and comfort
its weakness and hug it to his breast. It was that way with Di and her
husband. He couldn't drag her down. He couldn't find her weakness. She
was always up there. So he reviled her."

A silence fell between them. They stared at each other across the room's
breadth, finding each in the other something at the same time intimate
and incomprehensible; each feeling that they stood on the verge of a
discovery. It was Tabs who spoke.

"_Was!_ Then he's dead?"

She barely nodded. "Killed at the Somme, poor fellow. He must have hated
her to the end. In everything else he was large and splendid."

"And his name?"

Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown
woman's face. He _had_ seen it--of that he was certain. He had the sense
that the circumstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he
could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.

VII

"His name was Lord Dawn." Seeing the instant puckering of his brows, she