ourself a happy wedded
life for the couple after Miss Sally had made her unconscious _debut_
with the supremest indifference to her antecedents; construct a
hypothetical bliss for them at all costs, and then say if you can
fill out the picture with a relation between Sally and her putative
father to be compared for a moment to the one chance has favoured
now for the stepfather and stepdaughter of our story.

Our own imagination is at fault about the would-have-beens and
might-have-beens in this case. The only picture our mind can form of
what would have followed a full grasp of all the facts by Algernon
Palliser may be dictated or suggested by a memory of what sent Mr.
Salter, of Livermore's Rents, 1808, to the hospital. Rosalind knew
nothing of Mr. Salter, but she could remember well all Gerry's feats
of strength in his youth--all the cracking of walnuts in his
arm-joints and bending of kitchen-pokers across his neck--and also,
too well, an impotence against his own anger when provoked; it had
died down now to a trifle, but she could detect the trifle still.
Was such an executive to be trusted not to take the law into its own
hands, to fall into the grasp of an offended legislative function
later--one too dull to be able to define offence so as to avoid the
condemnation, now and again, of a culprit whose technical crime has
the applause of the whole human race? Had the author of all her
wrongs met his death at the hands of her young husband, might not
this husband of her later life--beside her now--be still serving his
time at the galleys, with every compulsory sharer in his condemnation
thinking him a hero?

It was all so much better as it had turned out. Only, could it
remain so?

At least, nothing was wrong now, at this moment. Whatever her husband
had said to Vereker in that morning walk, the present hour was a
breathing-space for Rosalind. The Kreutzkammer recurrence of the
previous evening was losing its force for her, and there had been
nothing since that she knew of. "Chaotic ideas"--the phrase he had
used in the night--might mean anything or nothing.

They came back from the railway-station by what was known to them as
the long short cut in contradistinction to the short short cut. The
latter, Sally said, had the courage of its opinions, while the former
was a time-serving cut. Could she have influenced it at the first
go-off--when it originally started from the V-shaped stile your skirts
stuck in, behin