were not there. Nothing would make her believe that you were
not dead."

She saw the muscles of his face contract with sudden pain.

He looked at her gravely. The look expressed his large male contempt for
her woman's cruelty; also a certain luminous compassion.

"Why have you told me this?" he said.

"I've told you, because I think the thought of it may restrain you when
nothing else will."

"I see. You mean to say, you believe I killed her?"

Anne closed her eyes.

CHAPTER XXXVI

He did not know whether he believed what she had said, nor whether she
believed it herself, neither could he understand her motive in saying it.

At intervals he was profoundly sorry for her. Pity for her loosened, from
time to time, the grip of his own pain. He told himself that she must
have gone through intolerable days and nights of misery before she could
bring herself to say a thing like that. Her grief excused her. But he
knew that, if he had been in her place, she in his, he the saint and she
the sinner, and that, if he had known her through her sin to be
responsible for the child's death, there was no misery on earth that
could have made him charge her with it.

Further than that he could not understand her. The suddenness and cruelty
of the blow had brutalised his imagination.

He got up and stretched himself, to shake off the oppression that weighed
on him like an unwholesome sleep. As he rose he felt a queer feeling in
his head, a giddiness, a sense of obstruction in his brain. He went into
the dining-room, and poured himself out a small quantity of whiskey,
measuring it with the accuracy of abstemious habit. The dose had become
necessary since his nerves had been unhinged by worry and the shock of
Peggy's death. This time he drank it almost undiluted.

He felt better. The stimulant had jogged something in his brain and
cleared it.

He went back into the study and began to think. He remained thinking for
some time, consecutively, and with great lucidity. He asked himself what
he was to do now, and he saw clearly that he could do nothing. If Anne
had been a passionate woman, hurling her words in a fury of fierce grief,
he would have thought no more of it. If she had been the tender, tearful
sort, dropping words in a weak, helpless misery, he would have thought
no more of it. He could imagine poor little Maggie saying a thing like
that, not knowing what she said. If it had been poor little Maggie he
could ha