ssed himself unfairly of her while he, the
father, was locked up.

"I won't rest till I have got you away from that man," he would murmur
to her after long periods of contemplation. We know from Powell how he
used to sit on the skylight near the long deck-chair on which Flora was
reclining, gazing into her face from above with an air of guardianship
and investigation at the same time.

It is almost impossible to say if he ever had considered the event
rationally. The avatar of de Barral into Mr Smith had not been
effected without a shock--that much one must recognise. It may be that
it drove all practical considerations out of his mind, making room for
awful and precise visions which nothing could dislodge afterwards. And
it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent tenacity, of the man
who had persisted in throwing millions of other people's thrift into the
Lone Valley Railway, the Labrador Docks, the Spotted Leopard Copper
Mine, and other grotesque speculations exposed during the famous de
Barral trial, amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled with bursts of
laughter. For it is in the Courts of Law that Comedy finds its last
refuge in our deadly serious world. As to tears and lamentations, these
were not heard in the august precincts of comedy, because they were
indulged in privately in several thousand homes, where, with a fine
dramatic effect, hunger had taken the place of Thrift.

But there was one at least who did not laugh in court. That person was
the accused. The notorious de Barral did not laugh because he was
indignant. He was impervious to words, to facts, to inferences. It
would have been impossible to make him see his guilt or his folly--
either by evidence or argument--if anybody had tried to argue.

Neither did his daughter Flora try to argue with him. The cruelty of
her position was so great, its complications so thorny, if I may express
myself so, that a passive attitude was yet her best refuge--as it had
been before her of so many women.

For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore
menacing. It makes one pause. A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an
agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply
stupid. But she is never dense. She's never made of wood through and
through as some men are. There is in woman always, somewhere, a spring.
Whatever men don't know about women (and it may be a lot or it may be
very little) men and even