criminal in such situations."

"You are not trying to defend him?" she asked quietly.

"Maybe I am; I don't know. After all, we are jumping at conclusions;
Peyton was drunk. But, for heaven's sake, if either of them comes to
you don't just be moral. Try to understand what may have happened. If
you lecture them they will leave you like a shot."

Fanny was driving, and she moved one hand from the wheel to his cheek.
"It isn't us, anyhow, Lee; and that is really all I care for. We are
closer than others, different. I don't know what I'd do if you should
die first--I couldn't move, I couldn't go on."

"You would have the children," he reminded her.

"They are nothing compared with you." It was the only time she had made
such an admission, and it moved him profoundly. It at once surcharged
him with gratitude and an obscure disturbance.

"You mustn't pin so much to me," he protested; "you ought to think of a
hundred other things."

"I would if I could; I often try, but it is impossible. It is terrible
to care for a man the way I do for you; and that's why I am so glad you
are what you are: silly at times, ridiculously impressionable, but not
at all like George Willard, or Peyton Morris."

He had an overwhelming impulse to explain himself in the most searching
unsparing detail to Fanny, the strange conviction that in doing it he