nd you, since Lady Fenimore would sooner or later
learn everything--was, as I say, horribly impossible.

Let them go, then, on their nominal holiday, during which the air might
clear. Boyce might take his mother away from Wellingsford. She would do
far more than uproot herself from her home in order to gratify a wish
of her adored and blinded son. He would employ his time of darkness in
learning to be brave, he had told me. It took some courage to face the
associations of dreadful memories unflinchingly, for his mother's sake.
Should he learn, however, that the Fenimores had an inkling of the
truth, he would recognise his presence in the place to be an outrage.
And such inkling--who would give it him? Perhaps I, myself. The Boyces
would go--the Fenimores could return. Anything, anything rather than
that the Fenimores and the Boyces should continue to dwell in the same
little town.

And there was Betty--with all the inexplicable feminine whirring inside
her--socially reconciled with Boyce. Where the deuce was this
reconciliation going to lead? I have told you how my lunatic love for
Betty had stood revealed to me. Had she chosen to love and marry any
ordinary gallant gentleman, God knows I should not have had a word to
say. The love that such as I can give a woman can find its only true
expression in desiring and contriving her happiness. But that she
should sway back to Leonard Boyce--no, no. I could not bear it. All the
shuddering pictures of him rose up before me, the last, that of him
standing by the lock gates and suddenly running like a frightened
rabbit, with his jaunty soft felt hat squashed shapelessly over his
ears.

Gedge could not have invented that abominable touch of the squashed hat.

I have said that possibly I myself might give Boyce an inkling of the
truth. Thinking over the matter in my restless bed, I shrank from doing
so. Should I not be disingenuously serving my own ends? Betty stepped
in, whom I wanted for myself. Neither could I go to Boyce and challenge
him for a villain and summon him to quit the town and leave those dear
to me at peace. I could not condemn him. I had unshaken faith in the
man's noble qualities. That he drowned Althea Fenimore I did not, could
not, believe. After all that had passed between us, I felt my loyalty
to him irrevocably pledged. More than ever was I enmeshed in the net of
the man's destiny.

As yet, however, I could not bear to see him. I could not bear to see
B