Such an outbreak would have been impossible in a man of pure English blood, and in a pure Oriental it would have manifested itself differently, but Isabel had truly said of Hyde that his temperament was not homogeneous:  the mixed strain in him betrayed him into strange incongruities of strength and weakness.  Isabel shut her eyes to incongruity.  She gave him without stint the pitying gentleness he thirsted for.  She refused now to contrast him with her brother.  Certainly Val’s judgment would have been cutting and curt.  But just?  Hardly.  By instinct Isabel felt that her brother’s clear, sane, English mind had not all the factors necessary for judging this collapse.

Her imagination was at work in the shadow:  “’the night—­that night. . . .”  How do men live through such hours?  She saw Lizzie as a chocolate-box beauty, but redeemed from hebetude by her robust youth:  able to attract Hyde by his love of luxury and to hold him by main force:  uneducated, coarse, and cruel, but not weak.  What a disastrous marriage! doomed from the outset, even if no Rendell had come on the scene.  Isabel dismissed Rendell rather scornfully:  in that night at Myrtle Villa she felt pretty sure that the duel had been fought out between husband and wife:  the very staging of it, picturesque for Lizzie Hyde and tragic for her husband, must for the entrapped lover have taken a frame of ignominious farce.  A gleam shot through Isabel’s eyes-as she imagined Rendell trying to face Hyde, and Hyde sparing him and sending him away untouched.  No, no! as between the two men, the honours lay with Hyde.

But as between him and Lizzie?  There the reckoning was not so easy.  His wife had set scars on him that would never wear out.  Dimly Isabel guessed that since coming out of her destructive hands Hyde himself could be both coarse and cruel:  the seed of brutality must have been in him all along, but Myrtle Villa had fertilized it.  If he married again, what would be required of Lizzie’s successor?  A strange deep smile gave to Isabel’s young lips the wisdom of the women of all the ages.  Love that gives without stint asking for no recompense:  love that understands yet will not criticize nor listen to criticism:  love that dares to deny its lover for his own sake.

After collapse came quiescence, and, after a long quiescence, revival.  Hyde raised himself on his arm and felt for his handkerchief—­indifferent to Isabel’s observation, or soothed by it:  his features were ravaged.  Isabel drenched her own handkerchief in Mrs. Bendish’s eau-de cologne and gave it him, dripping wet.  “Take this, it will do you good.”

“Thank you” said Lawrence, exhausted and subdued.

Becoming gradually rather more composed, he raised his eyes again.  “What must you think of me?  It is beyond apology.  Will you ever forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive:  I’m not hurt.”

“You’re rather young to hear such a history as mine.”