gotten. . . . She had known then; she must have known before she ran away. . . .
For a moment he thought, "I must be careful, or I shall go crazy. It must feel like this to lose one's mind." He thought, "It was I who did it. I drove her away. I killed her myself. She thought that I was lying to her all along. I wasn't lying. I wasn't lying. I was telling her the truth. . . . It would have been the truth, even now, to the end, if Mary hadn't come then. She must have been crazy. Both of us must have been crazy."
And then, after a time, he thought, "I've got to be calm. I've got to think this thing out." There wasn't, after all, any reason why there shouldn't have been two plates and two cups. Any one might have been having breakfast with him . . . any man, Krylenko, or even McTavish. Oh, it was all right. There couldn't have been anything wrong in that.
And then he thought bitterly, "But if it had been Krylenko, Naomi wouldn't have believed it. She'd be sure it was a woman. She'd think it was Lily Shane . . . Lily Shane, who wouldn't have looked at me. She was jealous of Lily Shane."
None of it was any good—none of this self-deception. It wasn't a man who had had breakfast with him. It was a woman—Mary Conyngham, only Naomi had believed it was Lily Shane. Thank God! It wasn't the same as if he and Mary together had driven her away to death in that horrible rooming-house. He'd never have to think of that after he and Mary were married. Naomi had believed the woman was Lily Shane.
Suddenly he pressed his hands to his eyes, so savagely that for a moment he was blinded. "I'm a fool. It's
