discovered and brought home to him. These were the ready-made notions the truth of which Le Mesurier had taken for granted: but now he had tested them; he had tested them, and behold, they were false. After all, he told himself, every man's experience is individual; you can learn nothing from books, nothing from the experience of others. Hearsay evidence is worthless. "I am a murderer, as it is called. I should inevitably be hanged if they could prove the thing against me. And yet—remorse?" No; he felt himself to be a thousand times happier, a thousand times easier in his mind, a thousand times more contented, more at peace, than he had ever been in the days of his innocence. In killing Shergold, he had simply removed an intolerable burden from his spirit.
He found himself singing, whistling, scraps of opera, snatches of old ballads, as he went about the daily routine of preparing his food, or as he wandered hither and thither over the scam sun-burned grass of the islet. After all, Shergold had well-deserved his fate. It was owing to him that Le Mesurier's life was ruined, his home broken up, his boy separated from him, his wife's affections alienated. It was thanks to Shergold that he had come here, more than a year ago, to lead the life of a misanthrope, alone in this melancholy Cottage on Le Tas.
And yet, Shergold was not his wife's lover; had never been her lover; never, Le Mesurier knew, had desired to be her lover. He thought he could almost have forgiven Shergold more easily if he had been her lover; the situation would have seemed, somehow, less abnormal than the actual one. But Shergold had got at her intellectually, had seduced her mind, had subjugated her spiritually. He had known her before her marriage, ever since she was a girl of sixteen. He had given her lessons in Greek, in mathematics. Possibly, had he not been a married man himself at the time, he
