usiness of his immortality. There she was,
there she always would be, associated with Charles Wrackham and his
work.

She sighed under the sunshade. "That child," she said, "can do more
for him, Mr. Simpson, than I can."

I could see that, though the poor lady didn't know it, she suffered
a subtle sorrow and temptation. If she hadn't been so amiable, if
she hadn't been so good, she would have been jealous of Antigone.

She assured us that only his wife and daughter knew what he really
was.

We wondered, did Antigone know? She made no sign of distance or
dissent, but somehow she didn't seem to belong to him. There was
something remote and irrelevant about her; she didn't fit into the
advertisement. And in her remoteness and irrelevance she remained
inscrutable. She gave no clue to what she really thought of him.
When "They" went for him she soothed him. She spread her warm
angel's wing, and wrapped him from the howling blast. But, as far
as we could make out, she never committed herself to an opinion. All
her consolations went to the tune of "They say. What say they? Let
them say." Which might have applied to anybody. We couldn't tell
whether, like her mother, she believed implicitly or whether she saw
through him.

She certainly saw beyond him, or she couldn't have said the things
she did--you remember?--at Ford Lankester's funeral. But she had
been overwrought then, and that clear note had been wrung from her
by the poignancy of the situation. She never gave us anything like
that again.

And she was devoted to him--devoted with passion. There couldn't be
any sort of doubt about it.

Sometimes I wondered even then if it wasn't almost entirely a
passion of pity. For she must have known. Burton always declared she
knew. At least in the beginning he did; afterwards he was not clear
about it any more than I was then. He said that her knowledge, her
vision, of him was complete and that her pity for him was
unbearable. He said that she would have given anything to have seen
him as her mother saw him and as he saw himself, and that all her
devotion to him, to it, his terrible work, was to make up to him for
not seeing, for seeing as she saw. It was consecration, if you like;
but it was expiation too, the sacrifice for the sin of an unfilial
clarity.

And the tenderness she put into it!

Wrackham never knew how it protected him. It regularly spoilt our
pleasure in him. We couldn't--when we thought of Antigone--get