"What line do you propose to take if you meet her?" I asked.
His brows set in a forbidding frown, and, when he spoke, it was between closed teeth, and his voice trembled.
"I think I told you, my instinct is to get her neck between my two hands and shake her as a terrier shakes a rat. I suppose that would be out of place in the more public parts of London, so I shall walk quietly past her. What induced you, knowing all you did——"
"I have no idea why I did it," I said, quite humbly.
"Are you going to do it again?"
"My dear George, once more, I have no idea. I'm like O'Rane in that I haven't been in the mood to analyse or make decisions. I've shirked them. I've deliberately tried to keep my mind occupied with other things so that I shouldn't have to think about this miserable business. Most of us are doing that, I fancy."
He was silent for many moments, and I fancied that he was visualising my meeting in the light of an early summer morning in Hyde Park with Sonia O'Rane, brown-eyed, red-lipped, redolent—to the senses—of purity and young freshness.
"As long as that swine's under lock and key," he said at length, "she can't make a move. And, when he's out, they're bound to hold their hand till they see what Raney's going to do, whether he's going to face a divorce—when I say 'face,' it's on her account, of course. He'd stand anything for himself, but I don't know that he'd let any damned two-and-one junior put questions to Sonia—I don't know, and he doesn't know...." He covered his face with his hands. "God in Heaven! Stornaway! I remember when I was the oldest fourth-year man and he was a freshman and she was nothing at all—a lovely little slip of a girl who'd been sent up for Commem. in place of a woman who'd failed us. Raney'd loved her ever since he'd first set those god-sent eyes of his on her, and they solemnly got engaged that night—when he was nineteen and she a baby three years younger...." The rising voice which was beginning to make our neighbours turn curiously round stopped of a sudden. "Sorry! I'm apt to break out every time I think of that boy coming back from the front ... and not letting it make that much difference to him ... and starting again at the bottom for God-knows-the-how-manyth-time—and then—this.... Well, Raney's not in a state to say whether he'll divorce her or not, what he will do, what he wants to do. You're quite right, we're none of us in a position to analyse. By the way, what do you propose to do, if you run into Beresford?"
"I don't see myself engaging him in conversation," I said.