"Poor old Meredith!" he muttered. "They have messed him up. It must be almost unbearable."
She drew herself gently away from him. The feel of his arm, with its ripple of steel muscle, had been wont to thrill her. Tonight he jarred on some raw susceptibility; his strength repelled rather than fascinated her senses.
"I don't think Owen feels about it like that," she said. "It's not awful to him. He recognizes it as a cross which he is glad to bear."
He shrugged his big shoulders with good-humoured impatience.
"Why should one be glad to bear crosses? It's that sort of spirit which makes crosses possible. Our business is to get rid of them—to blot out the very memory of such a thing——"
"A holy symbol!" she interjected eagerly.
"I don't see anything holy in it. It's a symbol of man's cruelty to man. If I believed in a devil, I should say he created it and put the idea into our poor heads that it was a thing to be cherished." He chuckled. "Well, I shall have a shot at lightening Meredith's cross whether he likes it or not, though he doesn't deserve it——"
"Why not?" she asked. He was moving about the room, evidently searching for his lost pipe. She watched him coldly. She had been very happy only a little time ago—very peaceful, very conscious of her own soul. It was as though a dishevelled giant had burst into her world, pulling it about her ears, trampling on her treasures. She loved him, but she was not blind. She saw, almost for the first time, that he was vitally of the earth. "Why not?" she repeated.
"Because through him lives were lost and endangered."
"Sigrid Fersen, for instance?"