She smiled very faintly, a smile which had in it no single element of joy or humour.

“I can quite understand my father intervening,” she said.  “He poses as being rather a patron of artistically-perpetrated crime.  Sue is his favourite author, and I believe that he has exceedingly grim ideas as to duelling and fighting generally.  He was in prison once for six months at New Orleans for killing a man who insulted my mother.  Nothing in the world would ever have convinced him that he had not done a perfectly legitimate thing.”

“I am expecting to find him quite an interesting study, when I know him better,” Francis pronounced.  “My only fear is that he will count me an unfriendly person and refuse to have anything to do with me.”

“I am not at all sure,” she said indifferently, “that it would not be very much better for you if he did.”

“I cannot admit that,” he answered, smiling.  “I think that our paths in life are too far apart for either of us to influence the other.  You don’t share his tastes, do you?”

“Which ones?” she asked, after a moment’s silence.

“Well, boxing for one,” he replied.  “They tell me that he is the greatest living patron of the ring, both here and in America.”

“I have never been to a fight in my life,” she confessed.  “I hope that I never may.”

“I can’t go so far as that,” he declared, “but boxing isn’t altogether one of my hobbies.  Can’t we leave your father and his tastes alone for the present?  I would rather talk about —­ourselves.  Tell me what you care about most in life?”

“Nothing,” she answered listlessly.

“But that is only a phase,” he persisted.  “You have had terrible trials, I know, and they must have affected your outlook on life, but you are still young, and while one is young life is always worth having.”

“I thought so once,” she assented.  “I don’t now.”

“But there must be—­there will be compensations,” he assured her.  “I know that just now you are suffering from the reaction—­after all you have gone through.  The memory of that will pass.”

“The memory of what I have gone through will never pass,” she answered.

There was a moment’s intense silence, a silence pregnant with reminiscent drama.  The little room rose up before his memory —­the woman’s hopeless, hating eyes, the quivering thread of steel, the dead man’s mocking words.  He seemed at that moment to see into the recesses of her mind.  Was it remorse that troubled her, he wondered?  Did she lack strength to realise that in that half-hour at the inquest he had placed on record for ever his judgment of her deed?  Even to think of it now was morbid.  Although he would never have confessed it even to himself, there was growing daily in his mind some idea of reward.  She had never thanked him—­he hoped that she never would—­but he had surely a right to claim some measure of her thoughts, some light place in her life.