acking agony, when he felt as though his will
were being torn out of him by the roots, he made no effort to
control them, releasing Isabel and dropping at full length upon
the turf. Nothing else, no torment of his own thoughts, not
Rendell's last pangs nor his wife's beauty young again in death
had ever made Hyde weep: if Rendell had died hard, Lawrence had
lived equally hard, locking up his frightful trouble in his own
breast, escaping from it when he could, cursing it and fighting
against it when it threatened to overpower him. But now he
surrendered to it and acknowledged to himself that it had broken
his life. And he felt no shame, not one iota, nothing but a
profound soulagement: the proud reticent man, too vain to shed
tears in his own room alone, wept voluntarily before Isabel,
uncovering for her pity the wounds not only of grief but of rage
and humiliation.

Such an outbreak would have been impossible in a man of pure
English blood, and in a pure Oriental it would have manifested
itself differently, but Isabel had truly said of Hyde that his
temperament was not homogeneous: the mixed strain in him betrayed
him into strange incongruities of strength and weakness. Isabel
shut her eyes to incongruity. She gave him without stint the
pitying gentleness he thirsted for. She refused now to contrast
him with her brother. Certainly Val's judgment would have been
cutting and curt. But just? Hardly. By instinct Isabel felt
that her brother's clear, sane, English mind had not all the
factors necessary for judging this collapse.

Her imagination was at work in the shadow: "'the night--that
night. . . ." How do men live through such hours? She saw Lizzie
as a chocolate-box beauty, but redeemed from hebetude by her
robust youth: able to attract Hyde by his love of luxury and to
hold him by main force: uneducated, coarse, and cruel, but not
weak. What a disastrous marriage! doomed from the outset, even
if no Rendell had come on the scene. Isabel dismissed Rendell
rather scornfully: in that night at Myrtle Villa she felt pretty
sure that the duel had been fought out between husband and wife:
the very staging of it, picturesque for Lizzie Hyde and tragic
for her husband, must for the entrapped lover have taken a frame
of ignominious farce. A gleam shot through Isabel's eyes-as she
imagined Rendell trying to face Hyde, and Hyde sparing him and
sending him away untouched. No, no! as between the two men, the
honou