ter, as Mrs Verloc believed him to be. He paused, and a snarl
lifting his moustaches above a gleam of white teeth gave him the
expression of a reflective beast, not very dangerous--a slow beast with a
sleek head, gloomier than a seal, and with a husky voice.

"And when it comes to that, it's as much your doing as mine. That's so.
You may glare as much as you like. I know what you can do in that way.
Strike me dead if I ever would have thought of the lad for that purpose.
It was you who kept on shoving him in my way when I was half distracted
with the worry of keeping the lot of us out of trouble. What the devil
made you? One would think you were doing it on purpose. And I am damned
if I know that you didn't. There's no saying how much of what's going on
you have got hold of on the sly with your infernal don't-care-a-damn way
of looking nowhere in particular, and saying nothing at all. . . . "

His husky domestic voice ceased for a while. Mrs Verloc made no reply.
Before that silence he felt ashamed of what he had said. But as often
happens to peaceful men in domestic tiffs, being ashamed he pushed
another point.

"You have a devilish way of holding your tongue sometimes," he began
again, without raising his voice. "Enough to make some men go mad. It's
lucky for you that I am not so easily put out as some of them would be by
your deaf-and-dumb sulks. I am fond of you. But don't you go too far.
This isn't the time for it. We ought to be thinking of what we've got to
do. And I can't let you go out to-night, galloping off to your mother
with some crazy tale or other about me. I won't have it. Don't you make
any mistake about it: if you will have it that I killed the boy, then
you've killed him as much as I."

In sincerity of feeling and openness of statement, these words went far
beyond anything that had ever been said in this home, kept up on the
wages of a secret industry eked out by the sale of more or less secret
wares: the poor expedients devised by a mediocre mankind for preserving
an imperfect society from the dangers of moral and physical corruption,
both secret too of their kind. They were spoken because Mr Verloc had
felt himself really outraged; but the reticent decencies of this home
life, nestling in a shady street behind a shop where the sun never shone,
remained apparently undisturbed. Mrs Verloc heard him out with perfect
propriety, and then rose from her chair in her hat and jacket like