“Yes, it must be the last time,” she agreed. “But—but, Nick, your plan won’t do, you know.”
Nick stiffened.
“Think not?” he said curtly. “Can you suggest a better?” Then, as Jean remained miserably silent: “Nor can I. And one thing I swear—I won’t leave the woman I love in the hands of a man who is practically a maniac, to be tortured day after day, mentally and physically, just whenever he feels like it.”
It struck Jean as curious that Nick had been able, more or less, to keep himself in hand whilst Sir Adrian inflicted upon Claire whatever of mental and spiritual torture seemed good in his distorted vision. It was the fact that he had hurt her physically, laid his hand upon her in actual violence, which had scattered Nick’s self-control to the four winds of heaven. To Jean herself, it seemed conceivable that the mental anguish of Claire’s married life had probably far outstripped any mere bodily pain. Half tentatively she gave expression to her thoughts.
Nick sprang to his feet.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “If you were a man, you’d understand! I see red when I think of that damned brute striking the woman I love. It—it was sacrilege!”
“And won’t it be—another kind of sacrilege—if you take her away with you, Nick?” asked Jean very quietly.
He flushed dully.
“He’ll divorce her, and then we shall marry,” he answered.
“Even so”—steadily—“it would be doing evil that good may come.”