"I'm not a terribly rigorous moralist," I went on. "I've a lot of sympathy with Paolo and Francesca and with Pelléas and Mélisande. But you can see for yourself that all such instances end unhappily, and when it's happiness you're primarily in search of—"
"Hers—especially," he interposed, with the same deliberation and some of the same unwillingness.
"Well, then, isn't your course clear? She'll never be happy with you if she kills the man she runs away from—"
He withdrew his cigarette and looked at me, wonderingly.
"Kills him? What in thunder do you mean?"
I explained my convictions. Howard Brokenshire wouldn't survive his wife's desertion for a month; he might not survive it for a day. He was a doomed man, even if his wife did not desert him at all. He, Stacy Grainger, was young. Mrs. Brokenshire was young. Wouldn't it be better for them both to wait on life—and on the other possibilities that I didn't care to name more explicitly?
So he wrestled with himself, and incidentally with me, turning back at last toward the village inn—and his motor. While shaking my hand to say good-by he threw off, jerkily:
"I suppose you know my secretary, Strangways, wants to marry you?"
My heart seemed to stop beating.
"He's—he's never said so to me," I managed to return, but more weakly than I could have wished.