er into marriage."

Sutch took his hand suddenly from his forehead.

"Suppose that you had never met her, would you still have sent in your
papers?"

"I think not," said Harry, slowly. "I want to be fair. Disgracing my
name and those dead men in the hall I think I would have risked. I could
not risk disgracing her."

And Lieutenant Sutch thumped his fist despairingly upon the table. "If
only I had spoken at Broad Place. Harry, why didn't you let me speak? I
might have saved you many unnecessary years of torture. Good heavens!
what a childhood you must have spent with that fear all alone with you.
It makes me shiver to think of it. I might even have saved you from this
last catastrophe. For I understood. I understood."

Lieutenant Sutch saw more clearly into the dark places of Harry
Feversham's mind than Harry Feversham did himself; and because he saw so
clearly, he could feel no contempt. The long years of childhood, and
boyhood, and youth, lived apart in Broad Place in the presence of the
uncomprehending father and the relentless dead men on the walls, had
done the harm. There had been no one in whom the boy could confide. The
fear of cowardice had sapped incessantly at his heart. He had walked
about with it; he had taken it with him to his bed. It had haunted his
dreams. It had been his perpetual menacing companion. It had kept him
from intimacy with his friends lest an impulsive word should betray him.
Lieutenant Sutch did not wonder that in the end it had brought about
this irretrievable mistake; for Lieutenant Sutch understood.

"Did you ever read 'Hamlet'?" he asked.

"Of course," said Harry, in reply.

"Ah, but did you consider it? The same disability is clear in that
character. The thing which he foresaw, which he thought over, which he
imagined in the act and in the consequence--that he shrank from,
upbraiding himself even as you have done. Yet when the moment of action
comes, sharp and immediate, does he fail? No, he excels, and just by
reason of that foresight. I have seen men in the Crimea, tortured by
their imaginations before the fight--once the fight had begun you must
search amongst the Oriental fanatics for their match. 'Am I a coward?'
Do you remember the lines?

Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?

There's the case in a nutshell. If only I had spoken on that night!"

One or two people passed