him to a larger justice towards the
writer.

He turned to Gertrude. "There are no alterations to be made, thank
heaven----"

"How about this?"

She slid the manuscript under his arm; her finger pointed to the margin.
He saw nothing.

"What?" He spoke with some irritation.

"This."

She turned up the lamp so that the light fell full upon the page. He
bent closer. On the margin, so blurred as to be almost indecipherable,
he saw his wife's sign, a square of delicate script. To a careless
reader it might have seemed to have been written with a light pencil and
to have been meant to stand. Examined closely it revealed the firm
strokes of a heavy lead obliterated with india-rubber. Gertrude's finger
slid away and left him free to turn the pages. There were several of
these marks in the same handwriting, each one deliberately erased. The
manuscript had been in his wife's hand within the last three days; for
three days certainly Tanqueray had been in Chagford, and for three weeks
for all Brodrick knew.

There was no reason why he should not be there, no reason why they
should not be together. Then why these pitiable attempts at concealment,
at the covering of the tracks?

And yet, after all, they had not covered them. They had only betrayed
the fact that they had tried. Had they? And which of them? Tanqueray in
the matter of obliteration would at any rate have been aware of the
utter inadequacy of india-rubber. To dash at a thing like india-rubber
was more the sudden, futile inspiration of a woman made frantic by her
terror of detection.

It was clear that Jane had not wanted him to know that Tanqueray was at
Chagford. She had not told him. Why had she not told him? She knew of
the plight they were in at the office, of the hue and cry after the
unappearing manuscript.

So his brain worked, with a savage independence. He seemed to himself
two men, a man with a brain that worked, following a lucid argument to
an obscure conclusion, and a man who looked on and watched its working
without attaching the least importance to it. It was as if _this_ man
knew all the time what the other did not know. He had his own light, his
own secret. He had never thought about it before (his secret), still
less had he talked about it. Thinking about it was a kind of profanity;
talking would have been inconceivable sacrilege. It was self-evident as
the existence of God to the soul that loves him; a secret only in that
it was profounde