He was, of course, not "in for it" at all. How many such conversations between human beings there were: it simply was that he had happened against his will to overhear a fragment of one of them. Yes, "against his will." How desperately he wished that he hadn't been there. What induced them to choose that room and that time for their secret confidences? He felt still in the echo of their voices the effect of their urgency.
They had chosen that room because there was some one watching their every movement and they had had only a few moments. The child—for surely she could not be more—had almost driven her companion into that two minutes' conversation, and Harkness could realise how desperate she must have been to have taken such a course.
But after all it was no business of his! Girls married every day men whom they did not love and, although apparently in this case, the man also did not love her and they were both of them in evil plight, still that too had happened before and nothing very terrible had come of it.
It was no business of his, and yet he did wish, all the same, that he could get the ring of the girl's voice out of his ears. He had never been able to bear the sight, sound or even inference of any sort of cruelty to helpless humans or to animals. Perhaps because he was so frantic a coward himself about physical pain! And yet not altogether that. He had
