, and--"

"Yes, I know. You predicted that Ulick Dean and I would become
friends, and you are right; we did."

"And you preferred that Evelyn should be his mistress rather than
that she shall go over to Monsignor?"

"I am not ashamed to confess I did; anything seemed better--but there
is no use arguing the point. What I have come to tell you is that
rather than go away with him she tried to kill herself." And he told
Harding the story.

"What an extraordinary story! But nothing is extraordinary in human
nature. What we consider the normal never happens. Nature's course
is always zigzag, and no one can predict a human action."

"Well, then, my good friend, when you have done philosophising--I
don't mean to be rude, but you see my nerves have been at strain for
the last four-and-twenty hours; you will excuse me. My notion now is
that everything has happened for the best." And he confided to
Harding his hopes of being able to persuade Evelyn to marry him.
"Only by marriage can she be saved, and I think I can persuade her."
And he babbled about her appearance last night after her long sleep,
comparing her with the portrait in his room. The painter had omitted
nothing of her character; all that had happened he read into the
picture--the restless spiritual eyes, and the large voluptuous
mouth, and the small high temples which Leonardo would like to draw.
The painting of this picture was as illusive as Evelyn herself, the
treatment of the reddish hair and the grey background.

And Harding listened, saying, "So this is the end."

"You think she will marry me?"

"Everything in nature is unexpected, that is all I can tell you. Art
is logic, Nature incoherency."

"Well, let us hope that Nature will be a little more coherent
to-morrow than she was last night, and that Evelyn will do the right
thing. Women generally marry when it is pressed upon them
sufficiently, don't you think so, Harding?"

"I hope it will be so, since you desire it."

"And you will be my best man, won't you?"

"I shall be only too pleased. Now, if you wait for me while I change
my boots we'll go out together." And the two men crossed the Green
Park talking of the great moral laxity of the time they lived in;
whereas in the eighteenth century men were even accused of boasting
of their successes, now the conditions were reversed, men never
admitting themselves to be anything else but virtuous; women, on the
contrary, publishing their _liaisons_, a