an
enormous rent in his solemnity, "if she thinks him absolutely a saint,
but she certainly imagines him to be a martyr."

It is one of the advantages of that magnificent invention, the prison,
that you may forget people which are put there as though they were dead.
One needn't worry about them. Nothing can happen to them that you can
help. They can do nothing which might possibly matter to anybody. They
come out of it, though, but that seems hardly an advantage to themselves
or anyone else. I had completely forgotten the financier de Barral. The
girl for me was an orphan, but now I perceived suddenly the force of
Fyne's qualifying statement, "to a certain extent." It would have been
infinitely more kind all round for the law to have shot, beheaded,
strangled, or otherwise destroyed this absurd de Barral, who was a danger
to a moral world inhabited by a credulous multitude not fit to take care
of itself. But I observed to Fyne that, however insane was the view she
held, one could not declare the girl mad on that account.

"So she thinks of her father--does she? I suppose she would appear to us
saner if she thought only of herself."

"I am positive," Fyne said earnestly, "that she went and made desperate
eyes at Anthony . . . "

"Oh come!" I interrupted. "You haven't seen her make eyes. You don't
know the colour of her eyes."

"Very well! It don't matter. But it could hardly have come to that if
she hadn't . . . It's all one, though. I tell you she has led him on, or
accepted him, if you like, simply because she was thinking of her father.
She doesn't care a bit about Anthony, I believe. She cares for no one.
Never cared for anyone. Ask Zoe. For myself I don't blame her," added
Fyne, giving me another view of unsuspected things through the rags and
tatters of his damaged solemnity. "No! by heavens, I don't blame her--the
poor devil."

I agreed with him silently. I suppose affections are, in a sense, to be
learned. If there exists a native spark of love in all of us, it must be
fanned while we are young. Hers, if she ever had it, had been drenched
in as ugly a lot of corrosive liquid as could be imagined. But I was
surprised at Fyne obscurely feeling this.

"She loves no one except that preposterous advertising shark," he pursued
venomously, but in a more deliberate manner. "And Anthony knows it."

"Does he?" I said doubtfully.

"She's quite capable of having told him herself," affirmed Fy