mind. It's worth it," said she.

At her look his sins rose up to his remembrance. He flung himself on his
knees beside the bed, shaken with his passion of remorse. He muttered a
wild, inarticulate confession.

"Don't, Nevill, don't," she whispered; "it made no difference. It's all
over and done with now."

He looked at her body and thought of the beauty of her soul. He broke
into vows and promises.

"Yes; it's all over. I swear I'll never look at another woman as long as
I live."

The pressure of her weak arms round his neck thrilled him with an
exquisite tenderness, a voluptuous pity. Surely, surely in his heart of
hearts he had never loved any woman as he loved her. She comforted him;
she whispered things too sacred for perfect utterance. It struck him from
time to time that she had no clear notion of the nature of the wrongs she
forgave, just as by some miracle her mind had dwelt apart from everything
that was base in her own marriage. Her ideas of evil were vague and
bodiless. She may have conceived Nevill to have been the victim of some
malign intellectual influence, the thrall, perhaps, of some Miss
Batchelor _sans merci_. There may have been mysteries, gulfs before which
she shuddered, dim regions which she could only just divine. He did not
know that with women like his wife there is all infinity between what
they realize and what they fear. Yet within its range of vision her love
was terribly clearsighted. And now, one by one, Tyson's sins fell from
him in the purifying fire of his wife's fancy.

He staggered to his feet and looked round him with glazed eyes; he was
drunk with his own emotions. She followed his gaze; it was caught by some
object above her bed.

"Hallo," said he, "what's my old sword doing there? My beauty!"

"I brought it in," said she.

"What did you do that for, eh?"

"I don't know. I think I thought that some day you'd walk off with it
somewhere, and that if you did that, you'd never come back again. So you
see I liked to know it was hanging safe up there when I was asleep. You
don't mind, do you?"

He muttered something about "rust" and "an outside wall."

"It's all right. I've cleaned it myself. I used to take it down and look
at it every day."

"When did you do that, Molly?"

"All the time you were away."

"Good God!" He took the sword down from the nail where it hung by a red
cord.

"You won't find a speck of dust on it anywhere," said she.

He had drawn the sword