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 252 Miss Lupton; he was a married man. You might as well think of Uncle Edward loving. . . loving anybody but Leonora. When people were married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt, people who misbehaved—but they were poor people—or people not like those she knew.

So these matters presented themselves to Nancy's mind.

But later on in the case she found that Mr. Brand had to confess to a "guilty intimacy" with someone or other. Nancy imagined that he must have been telling someone his wife's secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence. Of course it was not very gentlemanly—it lessened her opinion of Mr. Brand. But, since she found that Mrs. Brand had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could not have been very serious secrets that Mr. Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was forced on her conviction that Mr. Brand—the mild Mr. Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing "Blind Man's Buff" with his children and kissing his wife when he caught her—Mr. Brand and Mrs. Brand had been on the worst possible terms. That was incredible.

Yet there it was—in black and white. Mr. Brand drank; Mr. Brand had struck Mrs. Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr. Brand was adjudged, in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy