So far the narrative has reached the latter part of June.  He had spent the month with his mother.  As Betty had ordained that July should be blank, a month during which the moon should know no changes but only the crescent of Diana should shine supreme in the heavens, he had made his mundane arrangements for his fishing excursion to Norway.  On the afternoon of the 23rd he paid a farewell call at Wellings Park.  Althea, in the final settlement of their relations, had laid it down as a definite condition that he should maintain his usual social intercourse with the family.  A few young people were playing tennis.  Tea was served on the lawn near by the court.  Althea gave no sign of agitation.  She played her game, laughed with her young men, and took casual leave of Boyce, wishing him good sport.  He drew her a pace aside and murmured:  “God bless you for forgiving me.”

She laughed a reply out loud:  “Oh, that’s all right.”

When he told me that, I recalled vividly the picture of her, in my garden, on the last afternoon of her life, eating the strawberries which she had brought me for tea.  I remembered the little slangy tone in her voice when she had asked me whether I didn’t think life was rather rotten.  That was the tone in which she had said to him, “Oh, that’s all right.”

During the early afternoon on the 25th, she rang him up on the telephone.  Chance willed that he should receive the call at first hand.  She must see him before he left Wellingsford.  She had something of the utmost importance to tell him.  A matter of life and death.  With one awful thought in his mind, he placed his time at her disposal.  For what romantic, desperate or tragic reason she appointed the night meeting at the end of the chestnut avenue where the towing-path turns into regions of desolate quietude, he could not tell.  He agreed without argument, dreading the possible lack of privacy in their talk over the wires.

On that afternoon she came to me, as I have told you, with her strawberries and her declaration of the rottenness of life.

They met and walked along the towing-path.  It was bright moonlight, but she could not have chosen a lonelier spot, more free from curious eyes or ears.  And then took place a scene which it is beyond my power to describe.  I can only picture it to myself from Boyce’s broken, self-accusing talk.  He was going away.  She would never see him again until he returned to marry another woman.  She was making her last frantic bid for happiness.  She wept and sobbed and cajoled and upbraided—­You know what women at the end of their tether can do.  He strove to pacify her by the old arguments which hitherto she had accepted.  Suddenly she cried:  “If you don’t marry me I am disgraced for ever.”  And this brought them to a dead halt.

When he came to this point I remembered the diabolical accuracy of Gedge’s story.

Boyce said:  “There is one usual reason why a man should marry a woman to save her from disgrace.  Is that the reason?”