ess myself so irreverently,
wound up to a high pitch by his wife's interpretation of the girl's
letter. He enters with his talk of meanness and cruelty, like a bucket
of water on the flame.--Clearly a shock. But the effects of a bucket of
water are diverse. They depend on the kind of flame. A mere blaze of
dry straw, of course ... but there can be no question of straw there.
Anthony of the _Ferndale_ was not, could not have been, a straw-stuffed
specimen of a man. There are flames a bucket of water sends leaping
sky-high.

We may well wonder what happened when, after Fyne had left him, the
hesitating girl went up at last and opened the door of that room where
our man, I am certain, was not extinguished. Oh no! Nor cold; whatever
else he might have been.

"It is conceivable he might have cried at her in the first moment of
humiliation, of exasperation, `Oh, it's you! Why are you here? If I am
so odious to you that you must write to my sister to say so, I give you
back your word.' But then, don't you see, it could not have been that.
I have the practical certitude that soon afterwards they went together
in a hansom to see the ship--as agreed. That was my reason for saying
that Flora de Barral did go to sea..."

"Yes. It seems conclusive," I agreed. "But even without that--if, as
you seem to think, the very desolation of that girlish figure had a sort
of perversely seductive charm, making its way through his compassion to
his senses (and everything is possible)--then such words could not have
been spoken."

"They might have escaped him involuntarily," observed Marlow. "However,
a plain fact settles it. They went off together to see the ship."

"Do you conclude from this that nothing whatever was said?" I inquired.

"I should have liked to see the first meeting of their glances upstairs
there," mused Marlow. "And perhaps nothing was said. But no man comes
but of such a `wrangle' (as Fyne called it) without showing some traces
of it. And you may be sure that a girl so bruised all over would feel
the slightest touch of anything resembling coldness. She was
mistrustful; she could not be otherwise; for the energy of evil is so
much more forcible than the energy of good that she could not help
looking still upon her abominable governess as an authority. How could
one have expected her to throw off the unholy prestige of that long
domination? She could not help believing what she had been told; that
s