Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/360

 Le Mesurier no longer hated the man he had killed. A faint, hesitant sort of consideration, even of fellow-feeling for him, began gradually to edge its way in among his thoughts. He would sometimes try to put himself in Shergold's place; he would try to reconstruct the past from Shergold's point of view.

He found he could no longer persuade himself that Shergold had been conscious of the evil he had wrought. On the contrary, he recognised that the man had been honest according to his lights; that he had committed no crime against the accepted code. He might have acquired his influence over Lily, through no wish, no effort of his own. He had been one of those showy characters whom women always worship; he had possessed that superficial glittering cleverness that always catches a woman's fancy, he had talked with the fluent self-assurance which always wins a woman's approval. Probably he had never realised how obnoxious his presence at Rozaine was to Le Mesurier. He was sufficiently proud to have withdrawn from a society where he was not wanted, but his self-conceit was too magnificent for him ever to imagine such a contingency possible. And then, no doubt, his sense of conscious rectitude had rendered him particularly obtuse. Had he been playing the role of lover, a guilty conscience would have made him more sensitive to Le Mesurier's uncordial attitude. Looking back upon it all now, Le Mesurier could almost pity him for such blindness.

One day, lying in a hollow of the cliff, hidden from every eye but that of cormorant or sea-gull, playing abstractedly with a pebble which found itself under his fingers, he saw a yard away from him a sharp-nosed, grey-coated mole running from one point to another across the grass. He shot the pebble from his hand, and