ly on Mrs
Lawford. 'Why, why, could you not have seen?' he cried.

'It's no good, Vicar. She's all sheer Laodicean. Blow hot, blow cold.
North, south, east, west--to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry
the wind. There's nothing to be got from poor Sheila but....

'Lawford!' the little man's voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip;
'I forbid it. Do you hear me? I forbid it. Some self-command; my dear
good fellow, remember, remember it's only the will, the will that keeps
us breathing.'

Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and
flickered with shadows before his eyes. 'What's he mean, then,' he
muttered huskily, 'coming here with his black, still carcase--peeping,
peeping--what's he mean, I say?' There was a moment's silence. Then with
lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses
left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy
pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude.

'I suppose,' began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle himself
from the humiliation of the moment, 'I suppose he was--wandering?'

'Bless me, yes,' said Mr Bethany cordially--'fever. We all know what
that MEANS.'

'Yes,' said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford's white and intent
gaze.

'Just think, think, Danton--the awful, incessant strain of such an
ordeal. Think for an instant what such a thing means!'

Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin. 'Oh yes.
But--eh?--needlessly abusive? I never SAID I disbelieved him.'

'Do you?' said Mrs Lawford's voice.

He poised himself, as if it were, on the monolithic stability of his
legs. 'Eh?' he said.

Mr Bethany sat down at the table. 'I rather feared some such temporary
breakdown as this, Danton. I think I foresaw it. And now, just while we
are all three alone here together in friendly conclave, wouldn't it be
as well, don't you think, to confront ourselves with the difficulties?
I know--we all know, that that poor half-demented creature IS Arthur
Lawford. This morning he was as sane, as lucid as I hope I am now. An
awful calamity has suddenly fallen upon him--this change. I own frankly
at the first sheer shock it staggered me as I think for the moment it
has staggered you. But when I had seen the poor fellow face to face,
heard him talk, and watched him there upstairs in the silence stir and
awake and come up again to his trouble out of his sleep. I had no more
doubt in