have been so happy if
they had been less miserable and more useful."

As on the previous evening, they sat before the fire, and she began to
talk of various things in order to distract him. But what their lips
did not say, their eyes, on meeting, expressed with more intensity than
words could do.

It was Saniel who suddenly betrayed his preoccupation.

"Your brother studied Caffie well," he said, as if speaking to himself.

"He did, indeed!"

"He is certainly the most thorough rascal that I have ever met."

"He proposed something infamous, I am sure."

"He proposed that I should marry."

"I suspected that."

"This is the reason why he refuses to lend me the money. I was foolish
enough to tell him frankly just how I am 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 th