I loved you, and love you now. I see what your fear was: it was fear
for me, not for yourself. You thought that if you painted this picture
you would have to put something into it which I did not know--something
you were afraid of my hearing. I know it, and I am not afraid. But the
chapters we wrote together are still true; they are the truest part of
all. Your picture is not complete. It wants the most essential part of
all."

Once more she felt a tremor go through his arm, but still he said
nothing.

"You told me I did not understand what you meant," she said, "but I
understand now. And you too did not understand me if you thought that
anything in the world could make any difference to my love for you. We
have all of us in our natures something not nice to look at, but what
we stand or fall by is our beautiful chapters. You cannot destroy them,
Frank, though you thought you could, because they belong to me as well
as you, and I will not have them destroyed. You thought you had lost
them, but you have not. They are here. You may read them now with me."

Margery paused, and on the silence came the sudden, quick-drawn breath
that opens the gates of tears. In a moment she felt Frank's arms round
her, and his hands clasped about her neck.

"Margy! Margy!" he whispered, "have you got them now, even now? My God!
how little I knew! You shrank from me, and I thought you had given me
up; that there was nothing left to me but that--that horror. But what
can I do? My judgment book is written. Is not that true too?"

"Do you remember what you said?" asked Margery. "Did you not tell me
that you loathed what you were painting? Why did you loathe it?"

"Why did I loathe it? Why, because it was--something horrible,
wretched!"

"Let us go to the studio," said Margery.

"No, no!" cried he; "anywhere but there."

"Come, Frank," she said, "you must come with me."

In the passage hung a trophy made of knives and swords which Frank had
once bought in the Soudan. Margery took down one of these, a thick
steel dagger, short and two-edged. On the table below stood a lamp, and
this she took in her other hand.

"Open the door," she said to Frank.

Then she gave the dagger into his hand, and with the lamp, she stood
opposite the picture.

"Now!" she said.

He stood for a moment feeling the edge of the dagger, looking at
Margery. Then with a sudden movement he grasped the side of the easel
with one hand, and with the other plunged the dagger through the face.

"You devil, you devil!" he said.

He cut and stabbed the picture in fifty places. The torn shreds he
ripped off and threw on the ground, trampling on them or picking them
up to tear them again, and in a few moments all that there was left was
a few shreds hanging from the frame.

Jack Armitage arrived next day. He never knew why Margery had sent for
him, but she thanked him so genuinely for coming that he was not sorry
he came.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Judgment Books, by Edward Frederic Benson