heroism. Marcus had got weaker as an
imitable prototype during the conversation, and it had seemed to Gwen
that he might slip through her fingers altogether, if no help came. Her
"good cry" reinforced Marcus, and quite blamelessly; for who could find
fault with her for that much of concern for so fearful a calamity? What
had she said that she might not have said to a friend's husband, cruelly
and suddenly stricken blind? Indeed, could she as a friend have said
less? Was her human pity to be limited to women and children and cases
of special licence, or pass current merely under _chaperonage_? No--she
was safe so far certainly.

"Oh, Lady Gwendolen, I can't stand this," was Adrian's exclamation in a
tone of real distress. "Why--why--should I make you miserable and lay
you awake o' nights? I couldn't help your finding out, perhaps. But what
a selfish beast I am to go on grizzling about my own misfortune....
Well--I _have_ been grizzling! And all the while, as like as not, the
medicos are right, and in six weeks I shall be reading diamond type as
merry as a grig...."

"Do grigs read diamond type?"

"_I_ may be doing so, anyhow, grigs or no!" He paused an instant, his
absurdity getting the better of him. "I may have employed the expression
'grigs' rashly. I do not really know how small type they can read. I
withdraw the grigs. Besides, there's another point of view...."

"What's that?" Gwen is a little impatient and absent. Marcus Curtius has
waned again perceptibly.

"Why--suppose I had been knocked over two miles off, carried in, for
instance, at the Mackworth Clarkes', where 'Rene's gone...!"

"But you weren't!"

"Lady Gwendolen, you don't understand the nature of an hypothesis"--his
absurdity gets the upper hand again--"the nature of an hypothesis is
that its maker is always in the right. I am, this time. If I had been
nursed round at the Mackworth Clarkes', you would have known nothing
about me except as a mere accident--a person in the papers--a person one
inquires after...."

Gwen interrupts him with determination. "Stop, Mr. Torrens," she says,
"and listen to me. If you had been struck by a bullet fired by my
father's order, by his servant, on his land, it would not have mattered
what house you were taken to, nor who nursed you round. I should have
felt that the guilt--yes, the guilt!--the _sin_ of it was on the
conscience of us all; every one of us that had had a hand, a finger, in
it, directly or indirec