each other are, like everything else they do, the most
contemptible, the most pitiful things to look back upon. No, I've never
killed a man or loved a woman--not even in my thoughts, not even in my
dreams."

He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
during which she moved a little closer to him. After the lingering kiss
he did not relinquish his hold.

"To slay, to love--the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I
have no experience of either. You must forgive me anything that may have
appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my speeches,
untimely in my silences."

He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but indulgent
to it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness, that in holding
her surrendered hand he had found a closer communion than they had ever
achieved before. But even then there still lingered in him a sense of
incompleteness not altogether overcome--which, it seemed, nothing ever
would overcome--the fatal imperfection of all the gifts of life, which
makes of them a delusion and a snare.

All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily. His delicately playful
equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished with the
loss of his bitter liberty.

"Not murder, you say! I should think not. But when you led me to talk
just now, when the name turned up, when you understood that it was of me
that these things had been said, you showed a strange emotion. I could
see it."

"I was a bit startled," she said.

"At the baseness of my conduct?" he asked.

"I wouldn't judge you, not for anything."

"Really?"

"It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is." With her
other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one movement the
earth and the heaven. "I wouldn't do such a thing."

Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:

"I! I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!" he cried. "I, who could
not bear to hurt his feelings. I, who respected his very madness! Yes,
this madness, the wreck of which you can see lying about the jetty of
Diamond Bay. What else could I do? He insisted on regarding me as his
saviour; he was always restraining the eternal obligation on the tip of
his tongue, till I was burning with shame at his gratitude. What could I
do? He was going to repay me with this infernal coal, and I had to join
him as one joins a child's game in a nursery. One would no more have
thought of humiliati