nse--uneasy about her personal safety. A horrible fancy that even then
she might be looking over an embankment down into dark water, that she
might even now be glancing up at the hook on the door, took him. Women
had been known to do those things.... Then there would be an inquest, and
he himself would be called upon to identify her, and would be asked how
she had come by an ill-healed wound on the hand and a bad abrasion of the
ankle. Barrett would say that he had seen her leaving his house....

Then he recognised that his thoughts were morbid. By an effort of will he
put them aside, and sat for a while listening to the faint creakings
and tickings and rappings within his panelling.... If only he could have
married her!... But he couldn't. Her face had risen before him again
as he had seen it on the stairs, drawn with pain and ugly and swollen
with tears. Ugly--yes, positively blubbered; if tears were women's
weapons, as they were said to be, such tears were weapons turned against
themselves ... suicide again....

Then all at once he found himself attentively considering her two
accidents.

Extraordinary they had been, both of them. He _could not_ have left that
old nail standing in the wood; why, he had fetched tools specially from
the kitchen; and he was convinced that that step that had broken beneath
her weight had been as sound as the others. It was inexplicable. If these
things could happen, anything could happen. There was not a beam nor a
jamb in the place that might not fall without warning, not a plank that
might not crash inwards, not a nail that might not become a dagger. The
whole place was full of life even now; as he sat there in the dark he
heard its crowds of noises as if the house had been one great
microphone....

Only half conscious that he did so, he had been sitting for some time
identifying these noises, attributing to each crack or creak or knock its
material cause; but there was one noise which, again not fully conscious
of the omission, he had not sought to account for. It had last come some
minutes ago; it came again now--a sort of soft sweeping rustle that
seemed to hold an almost inaudibly minute crackling. For half a minute or
so it had Oleron's attention; then his heavy thoughts were of Elsie
Bengough again.

He was nearer to loving her in that moment than he had ever been. He
thought how to some men their loved ones were but the dearer for those
poor mortal blemishes that tell us we