ad to use my own judgment."

"You had not. You had to use mine."

He paused impressively.

"It's no use, my child, fighting against the facts."

To Henry Laura was a little angry child, crying over the bitter dose of
life. He had got to make her take it.

He towered over her, a Brodrick, the incarnate spirit of fact.

It was a spirit that revolted her. She stood her ground and defied it in
its insufferable tyranny. She thought of how these men, these Brodricks,
behaved to genius wherever they met it; how, among them, they had driven
poor Jinny all but mad, martyrizing her in the name of fact. As for
Owen, she knew what they had thought and said of him, how they judged
him by the facts. If it came to that she could fight the Doctor with his
own weapons. If he wanted facts he should have them; he should have all
the facts.

"_This_ isn't what's killing him," she said. "It's all the other things,
the things he was made to do. Going out to Manchuria--that began it. He
ought never to have been sent there. Then--five years on that abominable
paper. Think how he slaved on it. You don't know what it was to him. To
have to sit in stuffy theatres and offices; to turn out at night in vile
weather; to have to work whether he was fit to work or not."

He looked down at her very quietly and kindly. It was when people were
really outrageous that a Brodrick came out in his inexhaustible patience
and forbearance.

"You say he had to do all these things. Is that the fact?"

"No," said Laura, passionately, "it's the truth."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean it's what it amounted to. They--they drove him to it with their
everlasting criticism and fault-finding and complaining."

"I should not have thought he was a man to be much affected by adverse
criticism."

"You don't know," she retorted, "how he was affected. You can't judge.
Anyhow, he stuck to it up to the very last--the very last," she cried.

"My dear Mrs. Prothero, nobody wanted him to----"

"He did it, though. He did it because he was not what you all thought
him."

"We thought him splendid. My brother was saying only the other day he
had never seen such pluck."

"Well, then, it's his pluck--his splendour that he's dying of."

"And you hold us, his friends, responsible for that?"

"I don't hold you responsible for anything."

She was trembling on the edge of tears.

"Come, come," he said gently, "you misunderstand. You've been doing too
much. You'