Mrs. Bradmere. [Who has listened to his outburst in a soft of coma] You are a strange man!  One of these days you’ll go off your head if you don’t take care.

Strangway. [Smiling] One of these days the flowers will grow out of me; and I shall sleep.

     [Mrs. Bradmere stares at his smiling face a long moment in
     silence, then with a little sound, half sniff, half snort, she
     goes to the door.  There she halts.]

Mrs. Bradmere.  And you mean to let all this go on——­Your wife——­

Strangway.  Go!  Please go!

Mrs. Bradmere.  Men like you have been buried at cross-roads before now!  Take care!  God punishes!

Strangway.  Is there a God?

Mrs. Bradmere.  Ah! [With finality] You must see a doctor.

     [Seeing that the look on his face does not change, she opens the
     door, and hurries away into the moonlight.]

[Strangway crosses the room to where his wife’s picture hangs, and stands before it, his hands grasping the frame.  Then he takes it from the wall, and lays it face upwards on the window seat.]

Strangway. [To himself] Gone!  What is there, now?

     [The sound of an owl’s hooting is floating in, and of voices
     from the green outside the inn.]

Strangway. [To himself] Gone!  Taken faith—­hope—­life!

     [Jim Bere comes wandering into the open doorway.]

Jim Bere.  Gude avenin’, zurr.

     [At his slow gait, with his feeble smile, he comes in, and
     standing by the window-seat beside the long dark coat that still
     lies there, he looks down at Strangway with his lost eyes.]

Jim.  Yu threw un out of winder.  I cud ’ave, once, I cud.

     [Strangway neither moves nor speaks; and Jim Bere goes on with
     his unimaginably slow speech]

They’m laughin’ at yu, zurr.  An’ so I come to tell ’ee how to du.  ’Twas full mune—­when I caught ’em, him an’ my girl.  I caught ’em. [With a strange and awful flash of fire] I did; an’ I tuk un [He taken up Strangway’s coat and grips it with his trembling hands, as a man grips another’s neck] like that—­I tuk un.  As the coat falls, like a body out of which the breath has been squeezed, Strangway, rising, catches it.

Strangway. [Gripping the coat] And he fell!

     [He lets the coat fall on the floor, and puts his foot on it. 
     Then, staggering back, he leans against the window.]

Jim.  Yu see, I loved ’er—­I did. [The lost look comes back to his eyes] Then somethin’—­I dunno—­and—­and——­[He lifts his hand and passes it up and down his side] Twas like this for ever.