. Woodruff, and
Cheswardine also, had called her Vera during the whole of her life; and
she was thirty. They had all three lived in different houses at the top
end of Trafalgar Road, Bursley. Woodruff fell in love with her first,
when she was eighteen, but with no practical result. He was a
brown-haired man, personable despite his ungainliness, but he failed to
perceive that to worship from afar off is not the best way to capture a
young woman with large eyes and an emotional disposition. Cheswardine,
who had a black beard, simply came along and married the little thing.
She fluttered down on to his shoulders like a pigeon. She adored him,
feared him, cooed to him, worried him, and knew that there were depths
of his mind which she would never plumb. Woodruff, after being best
man, went on loving, meekly and yet philosophically, and found his
chief joy in just these suppers. The arrangement suited Vera; and as
for the husband and the hopeless admirer, they had always been fast
friends.

'I asked you what you were saying about murder,' said Vera sharply,
'but it seems--'

'Oh! did you?' Woodruff apologized. 'I was saying that murder isn't
such an impossible thing as it appears. Anyone might commit a murder.'

'Then you want to defend, Harrisford? Do you hear what he says,
Stephen?'

The notorious and terrible Harrisford murders were agitating the Five
Towns that November. People read, talked, and dreamt murder; for
several weeks they took murder to all their meals.

'He doesn't want to defend Harrisford at all,' said Cheswardine, with a
superior masculine air, 'and of course anyone might commit a murder. I
might.'

'Stephen! How horrid you are!' 'You might, even!' said Woodruff, gazing
at Vera.

'Charlie! Why, the blood alone--'

'There isn't always blood,' said the oracular husband.

'Listen here,' proceeded Woodruff, who read variously and enjoyed
philosophical speculation. 'Supposing that by just taking thought, by
just wishing it, an Englishman could kill a mandarin in China and make
himself rich for life, without anybody knowing anything about it! How
many mandarins do you suppose there would be left in China at the end
of a week!'

'At the end of twenty-four hours, rather,' said Cheswardine grimly.

'Not one,' said Woodruff.

'But that's absurd,' Vera objected, disturbed. When these two men began
their philosophical discussions they always succeeded in disturbing
her. She hated to see life in a quee