even if you can't excuse me--and I don't
deserve your excusing, I don't _want_ your excusing--you can understand
me a little better, and think of me a little more kindly.

"There was another woman. I couldn't help it, any more than any of us
can help anything. A fine, sympathetic young woman, who loved me because
she knew I was unhappy. I had been married to the other woman for four
years. We were completely estranged. We could scarcely bear to speak to
each other. I couldn't be easy one moment in the same house with her. I
had a cot in my office out in town because I couldn't even sleep soundly
at home. It was hell. The terror in her eyes made me physically sick. My
wife learned about the other woman. My wife was a devout Catholic, and
there was no possibility of a divorce. I could read in my wife's face
just what went on in her mind. She knew the other woman had become my
only reason for living. And one day I read in her eyes, along with the
terror, a glint of desperate determination. She knew she was in danger,
she knew I had a power that I could exercise when I chose in spite of
all the courts and police and jails in the country. She knew her life
was in danger, and her eyes told me that mine was in danger for that
very reason. I didn't blame her. Half my grief through all the years had
been grief for _her_. But the instinct of self-defense in me was
strong--and--she went--too--like----"

[Illustration: "And she went, too, like the other."]

He never finished his sentence. He dropped his head on the table and
began to sob hysterically. I laid a gingerly hand on his shoulder.

"Banaotovich," I said unsteadily, "I'm sorry for you----"

He sat up and supported his chin in both hands. "I haven't been as--as
bad as all this sounds like," he said after a while. "Before I was
married a second time, I went to the chief of police and gave myself up.
The chief listened to my story--I didn't try to explain it all, as I've
done with you, but just blurted out the main facts; but the longer he
listened the uneasier he became, and when I got through he asked me
nervously if I didn't think I ought to go into a sanitarium for a while.
Then he bowed me out in a big hurry. Perhaps if I had told him all the
ins and outs of it, it might have been different----"

"But don't you think he's right about the sanitarium?"

"Right? I'm as sane as you are. I've killed three people, a crazy
scoundrel, a hard man, and a pure, innocent woman