m situated, and how important it
is for me to be free until April. He hopes that I shall be so pushed that
I will accept one of the women whom he has proposed to me. With the knife
at my throat, I should have to yield."

"And these women?" she asked, not daring to look at him.

"Do not be alarmed, you have nothing to fear. One is the drunken widow of
a butcher, and the other is a young girl who has a baby."

"He dares to propose such women to a man like you!"

And Saniel repeated all that Caffie had said to him about these two
women.

"What a monster he is!" Phillis said.

"While he was telling me these things I thought of what you said--that if
some one killed him, it would be no more than he deserved."

"That is perfectly true."

"Nothing would have been easier than for me to have made away with him.
He had the toothache, and when he showed me his teeth I could easily have
strangled him. We were alone, and a miserable diabetic, such as he is,
who has not more than six months to live, I am sure, could not have
resisted a grasp like this. I could take his keys from his pocket, open
his safe, and take the thirty, forty, sixty thousand francs that I saw
heaped up there. The devil take me if it were ever discovered. A doctor
does not strangle his patients, he poisons them. He kills them
scientifically, not brutally."

"People who have no conscience can do such things; but for us they are
impossible."

"I assure you it is not conscience that would have restrained me."

"The fear of remorse, if I may use an ugly word."

"But intelligent persons have no remorse, my dear child, because they
reason before the deed, and not after. Before acting they weigh the pros
and cons, and know what the consequences of their actions will be to
others as well as to themselves. If this previous examination proves to
them that for some reason or other they may act, they will always be
calm, assured that they will feel no remorse, which is only the reproach
of conscience."

"Without doubt what you say is to the point, but it is impossible for me
to accept it. If I have never committed crimes, I have often been foolish
and have committed faults, many of them deliberately, after the
examination of which you speak. I should have been, according to you,
perfectly placid and free from the reproach of conscience; however, the
next morning I woke unhappy, tormented, often overwhelmed, and unable to
stifle the mysterious voice that accu