her voice. "You were quite willing to benefit by Jim Meredith's death;
you killed him as cold-bloodedly as you killed poor little Bulford, and
yet you must whine and snivel whenever your deeds are put into plain
language. What does it matter if Lydia dies now or in fifty years time?"
she asked. "It would be different if she were immortal. You people
attach so much importance to human life--the ancients, and the Japanese
amongst the modern, are the only people who have the matter in true
perspective. It is no more cruel to kill a human being than it is to cut
the throat of a pig to provide you with bacon. There's hardly a dish at
your table which doesn't represent wilful murder, and yet you never
think of it, but because the man animal can talk and dresses himself or
herself in queer animal and vegetable fabrics, and decorates the body
with bits of metal and pieces of glittering quartz, you give its life a
value which you deny to the cattle within your gates! Killing is a
matter of expediency. Permissible if you call it war, terrible if you
call it murder. To me it is just killing. If you are caught in the act
of killing they kill you, and people say it is right to do so. The
sacredness of human life is a slogan invented by cowards who fear
death--as you do."

"Don't you, Jean?" he asked in a hushed voice.

"I fear life without money," she said quietly. "I fear long days of work
for a callous, leering employer, and strap-hanging in a crowded tube on
my way home to one miserable room and the cold mutton of yesterday. I
fear getting up and making my own bed and washing my own handkerchiefs
and blouses, and renovating last year's hats to make them look like this
year's. I fear a poor husband and a procession of children, and doing
the housework with an incompetent maid, or maybe without any at all.
Those are the things I fear, Mr. Briggerland."

She dusted the ash from her dress and got up.

"I haven't forgotten the life we lived at Ealing," she said
significantly.

She looked across the bay to Monte Carlo glittering in the morning
sunlight, to the green-capped head of Cap-d'Ail, to Beaulieu, a jewel
set in greystone and shook her head.

"'It is written'," she quoted sombrely and left him in the midst of the
question he was asking. She strolled back to the house and joined Lydia
who was looking radiantly beautiful in a new dress of silver grey
charmeuse.

Chapter XX

"Have you solved the mystery of the su