ng time afterwards he said: "I guess it was only
a flash in the pan." He began to look after the estates again; he
took all that trouble over getting off the gardener's daughter who had
murdered her baby. He shook hands smilingly with every farmer in the
market-place. He addressed two political meetings; he hunted twice.
Leonora made him a frightful scene about spending the two hundred pounds
on getting the gardener's daughter acquitted. Everything went on as if
the girl had never existed. It was very still weather.

Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at it I see
that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The villains--for
obviously Edward and the girl were villains--have been punished by
suicide and madness. The heroine--the perfectly normal, virtuous and
slightly deceitful heroine--has become the happy wife of a perfectly
normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful husband. She will shortly become
a mother of a perfectly normal, virtuous slightly deceitful son or
daughter. A happy ending, that is what it works out at.

I cannot conceal from myself the fact that I now dislike Leonora.
Without doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayham. But I don't know whether
it is merely a jealousy arising from the fact that I desired myself to
possess Leonora or whether it is because to her were sacrificed the only
two persons that I have ever really loved--Edward Ashburnham and Nancy
Rufford. In order to set her up in a modern mansion, replete with
every convenience and dominated by a quite respectable and eminently
economical master of the house, it was necessary that Edward and Nancy
Rufford should become, for me at least, no more than tragic shades.

I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness, upon
cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus or
wherever it was.

And as for Nancy... Well, yesterday at lunch she said suddenly:

"Shuttlecocks!"

And she repeated the word "shuttlecocks" three times. I know what was
passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has
told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock
being tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of
Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said, was always trying to deliver her
over to Edward, and Edward tacitly and silently forced her back again.
And the odd thing was that Edward himself considered that those two
women used him like a shuttlecock