, what manner of man he was. She might have
endured if she had still been able to tell herself of the wonderful
things that he would do. No such comfort was open now. The man was still
what he was; but he would do nothing. There came the change.

"That's the weak point about marriage as compared with other contractual
arrangements," said Morewood to Dick Benyon. "You can never in any
bargain ensure people getting what they expect to get--because to do that
you'd have to give all of them sense--but in most you can to a certain
extent see that they're allowed to keep what they actually did get. In
marriage you can't. Something of this sort happens and the whole
understanding on which the arrangement was based breaks down."

"Do people marry on understandings?" asked Dick doubtfully.

"The only way of getting anything like justice for her is that he should
die. You must see that?"

"I don't know anything about it," said Dick morosely, "but I hear there's
no particular likelihood of his dying if he obeys orders and keeps
quiet."

"Just so, just so," said Morewood. "That's exactly what I mean. Do you
suppose she'd ever have taken him if he'd been going to keep quiet? You
know why you took him up; well, she did just the same. You know what you
found him; she's found him just the same. What's left now? The _role_ of
a loving nurse! She's not born a nurse; and how in the devil's name is
she to be expected to love him?"

Dick Benyon found no answer to questions which put with a brutal
truthfulness the salient facts of the position. The one thing necessary,
the one thing which would have made the calamity bearable, perhaps better
than bearable, was wanting. She might love or have loved things in him,
or about him, or done by him; himself she did not love; and now nothing
but himself remained to her. Seeing the matter in this light, Dick was
dumb before Morewood's challenge to him to say, if he dared, that he
hoped a long life for Alexander Quisante. Yet neither would he wish his
death; for Dick had been an enthusiast, the spell had been very strong on
him, and there still hung about him something of that inability to think
of Quisante as dead or dying, something of the idea that he must live and
must by very strength of will find strength of body, which had prevented
May herself from believing that the news which came in her telegram could
mean anything really serious. While Quisante lived, there would always be
to Dick a p