! He's got people's bodies and brains and souls dissected,
and nothing they can do is unaccountable to him! Men like that are
beyond the ordinary human weaknesses, you know."

She did know, very much better than he, and hugged dear thoughts as she
smiled faintly at him.

"Then he began to take whisky out and hold it up in front of me by its
hind legs, kicking. And it looked pretty silly before he'd finished with
it. I was sick of it, I tell you."

She started. She remembered how ashamed he had made her of those
momentary cheap thrills of hers. What was it he had said--"Like a queen
going on the streets?"

"He'd smashed me up, I tell you."

"And me," she said softly.

"Though I knew I'd lost you then, I knew I'd lost whisky too. All the
striving things that had made me up, you see, were lying in ruins, and
the whisky seemed such a disgusting, ridiculous thing it wouldn't fit in
anywhere. Like one of those jigsaw puzzles--the whisky bit put all the
rest out. I felt a most blissful peacefulness ... like, I suppose, when
a cancer is taken away after months of hellish pain. You can't imagine
it! It was just like those Salvation Army chaps you hear in the street
sometimes talking about being at peace with God. You can see they are,
they look so beaming! I felt like that. Only God didn't seem to come
into it. I was just at peace with myself."

She nodded, and he went on slowly:

"I'm not clear about the rest. Having smashed me, you see, he began to
put me together again. I felt I could worship him--that sounds rather
like hot air, old girl, but it's quite true" he added, reddening a
little. "He'd got rid of that bally cancer for me."

"But how did you know--?"

"How do you know the sun has risen, dear? How did that poor devil that
was tearing himself in the tombs know that he need fear no more when
Christ spoke to him? How did the blind man know he could see? I just
don't know, but it happened. And Marcella, do you know what I did?
Lord--it was awful. I cried like anything, and asked him to give you
back to me. It came to me like a flash that I'd no right to you, that
you and he were much righter for each other. But I just couldn't spare
you. More selfishness! And it seemed I'd such a lot to make up to you.
He said: 'Are you sure you can take care of her now, Louis?' I laughed.
It seemed such cool, calm impudence the way our positions were reversed.
He laughed too, and said: 'Queer how we still look upon women as g