At first he was merely stunned. Later, when he thawed to understanding of the part his own impotent hand had taken in directing the tragedy, he spoke of himself as a murderer.
Ferlie stepped in and sternly banished the word.
"It is pure hysteria that makes you use it," she told him. "I blame myself more than you, for I am a woman and should have been enough in sympathy with another women's mind to have prevented this. If you are a murderer then I am a murderess."
He railed at her foolishness but sped off on another track.
"Why should this have happened to me?" in bewildered anger. "No other man of my acquaintance has ever had to face such an experience, and I have done no more than what so many do. In this custom there is no disgrace to the woman. She usually settles down, in the end, with one of her own race. I—Ferlie, believe me—I tried to play the game. She need never have done it. I tell you there was no disgrace."
"There was something else though," she reminded him, "and that left her little choice. It is as I said, Cyprian; no one seems able to escape its scourge."
"But they don't love like that," he persisted. "How can they? There is no link but that frail fleshly one of which a man remains vaguely ashamed the whole time."
"There is that link," and she pointed to Thu Daw, perilously employed with a coloured wooden mallet and a rusty nail.
She moved across the room to take it away from him and, substituting a woollen ball, returned to lay her arm lightly about Cyprian's bowed shoulders.
"There has been enough in the past," he said. "Why should Fate have picked me out for this extra bruising?"