That was the beginning of it.  Betty, whom he loved, and to whom he was engaged, was away from Wellingsford.  In those days she was very much the young Diana, walking in search of chaste adventures, quite contented with the love that lay serenely warm in her heart and thinking little of a passionate man’s needs—­perhaps starting away from too violent an expression of them—­perhaps prohibiting them altogether.  The psychology of the pre-war young girl absorbed, even though intellectually and for curiosity’s sake, in the feminist movement, is yet to be studied.  Betty, then, was away.  Althea, beata possidens, made her artless, innocent appeal for victory.  Unconsciously she tempted.  The man yielded.  A touch of the lips in a moment of folly, the man blazed, the woman helpless was consumed.  This happened in January, just before Althea’s supposed visit to Scotland.  Boyce was due at a Country House party near Carlisle.  In the first flush of their madness they agreed upon the wretched plan.  She took rooms in the town and he visited her there.  Whether he or she conceived it, I do not know.  If I could judge coldly I should say that it was of feminine inspiration.  A man, particularly one of Boyce’s temperament, who was eager for the possession of a passionately loved woman, would have carried her off to a little Eden of their own.  A calm consideration of the facts leads to the suggestion of a half-hearted acquiescence on the part of an entangled man in the romantic scheme of an inexperienced girl to whom he had suddenly become all in all.

Such is my plea in extenuation of Boyce’s conduct (if plea there can be), seeing that he raised not a shadow of one of his own.  You may say that my plea is no excuse for his betrayal; that no man, even if he is tempted, can be pardoned for non-control of his passions.  But I am asking for no pardon; I am trying to obtain your understanding.  Remember what I have told you about Boyce, his great bull-neck, his blood-sodden life-preserver, the physical repulsion I felt when he carried me in his arms.  In such men the animal instinct is stronger at times than the trained will.  Whether you give him a measure of your sympathy or not, at any rate do not believe that his short-lived liaison with Althea was a matter of deliberate and dastardly seduction.  Nor must you think that I am setting down anything in disparagement of a child whom I once loved.  Long ago I touched lightly on the anomaly of Althea’s character—­her mid-Victorian sentimentality and softness, combined with her modern spirit of independence.  A fatal anomaly; a perilous balance of qualities.  Once the soft sentimentality was warmed into romantic passion, the modern spirit led it recklessly to a modern conclusion.

The liaison was short-lived.  The man was remorseful.  He loved another woman.  Very quickly did the poor girl awaken from her dream.