"Most assuredly," he replied with an enigmatic smile. "I'm just a bit surprised that you don't see it yourself, Whitney. It seems to me that a chap like you ought not to miss a point like that. But then, you haven't had a night alone on the Cora Andrews to broaden your understanding like I have."
"What was it?" I asked bluntly, completely mystified and not a little awed.
"Just this," he answered, growing suddenly serious. "That bottle I shoved along to Bell the night he died had been partly emptied—by me, of course. Well, the first thought that entered the girl's head, when she came across it on the deck near his body, was that he had been drinking from it. In spite of all my assurances to the contrary, it seems that she was never able to rid her mind of that idea. That was—"
"But couldn't she see why you offered him the whisky?" I interrupted. "What if he did drink some of it? She must have known it was the one thing that would have saved his life."
"Ah, that is just where you miss the point, Whitney," he cried. "And that was just where I always missed it until—she showed me the way to a broader understanding. Don't you see that Rona realized that keeping away from whisky, as he had sworn he would, had come to mean more to Bell than even a new lease on life? Well, she did. But, even so, one would hardly have expected her to fall in with the idea. And yet, don't her actions prove that she even did that? Whitney, I've never come across anything comparable to the straight physical passion of those two for each other. And, if anything, hers was the hotter flame of the two. There must have been something of the impetuousness of her rages in her loving,—for.... Well, the most maddening of all the thoughts I tried so long to stifle in Kai was the one that those frequent welts and abrasions appearing on Bell's neck and cheeks and arms were not from the bites of no-nos or mosquitoes. And yet, loving his body like that, she loved his soul enough more to be willing to give up the body that the soul might pass in peace. It was because she thought I had intervened to destroy that peace of soul, Whitney, that she—well, the effect of it was to pave the way to my broader understanding."
THE END
Woods & Sons, Ltd., Printers, London, N. 1.
Transcriber Notes:
Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is.