offence. Instead they took the
cigars that he offered and a few accessories which they grabbed. It is a
way the police have. Still Lennox laughed. He knew of course that at
Headquarters he would be at once released, the entire incident properly
regretted. When he found himself not only elaborately wrong but in
court, laughter ceased. Anger replaced it. He had been first amused,
then surprised, afterwards exasperated, emotions that finally addled
into rage, not at others but at himself, which was rather decent. In any
of the defeats of life, the simple blame others; the wise blame
themselves; the evolved blame nobody. Lennox had not reached that high
plane then but in directing his anger at himself he showed the
advantages of civilisation which the war has put in such admirable
relief.

Now, on that cot, in that cell, ragingly he retraced his steps. He saw
himself loving Margaret Austen as though he were to love her forever. A
hero can do no more. He saw her loving him with a love so light that a
breath had blown it away. A nymph in the brake could do no worse. Yet
whether on her part it were perversity or mere shallowness, the result
was the same. It had landed him in jail. For that he acquitted her
completely. What he could not forgive was his own stupidity in
persisting in loving her after she had turned away.

The night before, while, at the opera, the _Terra Addio_ was being sung,
he had been writing her one of the endless letters that only those
vomiting in an attack of indignation morbus ever produce. In the relief
of getting it in black and white, the nausea abated. Then judging it all
very idle, he tore the letter in two. It was a gesture made before
relapsing into a silence which he had intended should be eternal. At the
very moment when Paliser was being run through the gizzards, he, turning
a page of life, had scrawled on it Hic jacet.

Now, on that cot, Paliser recurring, he thought of him with so little
animosity that he judged his spectacular death inadequate. But who, he
wondered, had staged it? Not Cassy. Cassy took things with too high a
hand and reasonably perhaps, since she took them from where her
temperament had placed her. Then, without further effort at the riddle,
his thoughts drifted back to that afternoon when, from his rooms, the
sunlight had followed her out like a dog.

He had been looking at the floor, but without seeing it. Then at once,
without seeing it either, he saw something else,