retended indignation.

"It would serve you right if I told you that I have. But I won't. I
haven't failed. I own though that for a time, I was puzzled. However, I
have now seen our Powell many times under the most favourable
conditions--and besides I came upon a most unexpected source of
information . . . But never mind that. The means don't concern you
except in so far as they belong to the story. I'll admit that for some
time the old-maiden-lady-like occupation of putting two and two together
failed to procure a coherent theory. I am speaking now as an
investigator--a man of deductions. With what we know of Roderick Anthony
and Flora de Barral I could not deduct an ordinary marital quarrel
beautifully matured in less than a year--could I? If you ask me what is
an ordinary marital quarrel I will tell you, that it is a difference
about nothing; I mean, these nothings which, as Mr. Powell told us when
we first met him, shore people are so prone to start a row about, and
nurse into hatred from an idle sense of wrong, from perverted ambition,
for spectacular reasons too. There are on earth no actors too humble and
obscure not to have a gallery; that gallery which envenoms the play by
stealthy jeers, counsels of anger, amused comments or words of perfidious
compassion. However, the Anthonys were free from all demoralizing
influences. At sea, you know, there is no gallery. You hear no
tormenting echoes of your own littleness there, where either a great
elemental voice roars defiantly under the sky or else an elemental
silence seems to be part of the infinite stillness of the universe.

Remembering Flora de Barral in the depths of moral misery, and Roderick
Anthony carried away by a gust of tempestuous tenderness, I asked myself,
Is it all forgotten already? What could they have found to estrange them
from each other with this rapidity and this thoroughness so far from all
temptations, in the peace of the sea and in an isolation so complete that
if it had not been the jealous devotion of the sentimental Franklin
stimulating the attention of Powell, there would have been no record, no
evidence of it at all.

I must confess at once that it was Flora de Barral whom I suspected. In
this world as at present organized women are the suspected half of the
population. There are good reasons for that. These reasons are so
discoverable with a little reflection that it is not worth my while to
set them out for you. I