“I’ll smoke after all,” he said.
“Do.”
Murchison opened his cigar-case. Canon Stensly was as deliberate as a man wholly at his ease. There was not a tremor as he held the lighted match.
“Do you know, Murchison, I appreciate this—deeply?”
He returned the match-box.
“It puts you in a new light to me, a finer light, with that rare wife of yours.”
Murchison was refilling his pipe, lines of thought crossing his forehead.
“When my child died—”
“Yes—”
“I seemed to lose part of myself. I had crushed the curse then. I don’t know how to explain the psychology of the affair, but when she died, the other thing died also.”