Let them go, then, on their nominal holiday, during which the air might clear.  Boyce might take his mother away from Wellingsford.  She would do far more than uproot herself from her home in order to gratify a wish of her adored and blinded son.  He would employ his time of darkness in learning to be brave, he had told me.  It took some courage to face the associations of dreadful memories unflinchingly, for his mother’s sake.  Should he learn, however, that the Fenimores had an inkling of the truth, he would recognise his presence in the place to be an outrage.  And such inkling—­who would give it him?  Perhaps I, myself.  The Boyces would go—­the Fenimores could return.  Anything, anything rather than that the Fenimores and the Boyces should continue to dwell in the same little town.

And there was Betty—­with all the inexplicable feminine whirring inside her—­socially reconciled with Boyce.  Where the deuce was this reconciliation going to lead?  I have told you how my lunatic love for Betty had stood revealed to me.  Had she chosen to love and marry any ordinary gallant gentleman, God knows I should not have had a word to say.  The love that such as I can give a woman can find its only true expression in desiring and contriving her happiness.  But that she should sway back to Leonard Boyce—­no, no.  I could not bear it.  All the shuddering pictures of him rose up before me, the last, that of him standing by the lock gates and suddenly running like a frightened rabbit, with his jaunty soft felt hat squashed shapelessly over his ears.

Gedge could not have invented that abominable touch of the squashed hat.

I have said that possibly I myself might give Boyce an inkling of the truth.  Thinking over the matter in my restless bed, I shrank from doing so.  Should I not be disingenuously serving my own ends?  Betty stepped in, whom I wanted for myself.  Neither could I go to Boyce and challenge him for a villain and summon him to quit the town and leave those dear to me at peace.  I could not condemn him.  I had unshaken faith in the man’s noble qualities.  That he drowned Althea Fenimore I did not, could not, believe.  After all that had passed between us, I felt my loyalty to him irrevocably pledged.  More than ever was I enmeshed in the net of the man’s destiny.

As yet, however, I could not bear to see him.  I could not bear to see Betty, who called now and then.  For the first time in my life I took refuge in my invalidity, whereby I earned the commendation of Cliffe.  Betty sent me flowers.  Mrs. Boyce sent me grapes and an infallible prescription for heart attacks which, owing to the hopeless mess she had made in trying to copy the wriggles indicating the quantities of the various drugs, was of no practical use.  Phyllis Gedge sent me a few bunches of violets with a shy little note.  Lady Fenimore wrote me an affectionate letter bidding me farewell.  They were going to Bude in Cornwall, Anthony having put