“I was cruel,” said Boyce, fixing me with those awful black spectacles, “I know it.  I ought to have married her.  But if I had married her, I should have been more cruel.  I should have hated her.  It would have been an impossible life for both of us.  One day I had to tell her so.  Not brutally.  In a normal state I think I am as kind-hearted and gentle as most men.  And I couldn’t be brutal, feeling an unutterable cur and craving her forgiveness.  But I wanted Betty and I swore that only one thing should keep me from her.”

“One thing?” I asked.

“The thing that didn’t happen,” said he.

And so it seemed that Althea accepted the inevitable.  The placid, fatalistic side of her nature asserted itself.  Pride, too, helped her instinctive feminine secretiveness.  She lived for months in her father’s house without giving those that were dear to her any occasion for suspicion.  In order to preserve the secrecy Boyce was bound to continue his visits to Wellings Park.  Now and then, when they met alone, she upbraided him bitterly.  On the whole, however, he concluded that they had agreed to bury an ugly chapter in their lives.

Yes, it was an ugly chapter.  From such you cannot get away, bury it, as you will, never so deep.

“And all the time remember,” he said, “that I was mad for Betty.  The more shy she was, the madder I grew.  I could not rest in Wellingsford without her.  When she came here, I came.  When she went to town, I went to town.  She was as elusive as a dream.  Finally I pinned her down to a date for our marriage in August.  It was the last time I saw her.  She went away to stay with friends.  That was the beginning of June.  She was to be away two months.  I knew, if I had clamoured, she would have made it three.  It was the shyness of the exquisite bird in her that fascinated me.  I could never touch Betty in those days without dreading lest I might soil her feathers.  You may laugh at a hulking brute like me saying such things, but that’s the way I saw Betty, that’s the way I felt towards her.  I could no more have taken her into my bear’s hug and kissed her roughly than I could have smashed a child down with my fist.  And yet—­My God, man! how I ached for her!”

Long as I had loved Betty in a fatherly way, deeply as I loved her now, the man’s unexpected picture of her was a revelation.  You see it was only after her marriage, when she had softened and grown a woman and come so near me that I felt the great comfort of her presence when she was by, the need of it when she was away.  How could I have known anything of the elusiveness in her maidenhood before which he knelt so reverently?

That he so knelt is the keynote of the man’s soul untainted by the flesh.

It made clear to me the tenderness that lay beneath that which was brutal; the reason of that personal charm which had captivated me against my will; his defencelessness against the Furies.