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evidence is perfectly clear. The deceased woman was unfaithful to her husband during his absence overseas, and gave birth to a child born out of wedlock. She was deserted by her lover, himself a married man, so that in any event no divorce and marriage with her lover would have been possible. Her husband seems to have behaved with commendable restraint and wrote nothing to her which would have led her to take her life, and her family appear to have treated her with sympathy and understanding. The deceased appears to have been the victim of her own conscience, and as the time for the return of her husband drew near she became mentally upset. I find that the deceased committed suicide while the balance of her mind was temporarily deranged.”
    He turned to us with fishlike, stupid eyes blinking behind his spectacles. “I must express my sympathy with the husband and the parents of the deceased woman.” With her Dad and Mum I said, “Thank you, sir,” mechanically, and as I did so indignation rose in me that such a fool should be a coroner. Because I killed her, slowly, like a chap might do with small doses of arsenic over a period of years. I started killing her when I married her without giving her a home.
    A bit was said about the baby, and a woman, a police court missionary or somebody like that, came up and talked about it to her Dad and Mum. They wanted to keep it and bring it up as a grandchild, which of course it was, and that seemed the best thing to do. Then the inquest was over, and we went back for the funeral which happened in the afternoon.
    I left her parents at the cemetery when it was all over; they wanted me to go back home with them for tea, but I said I had to get down to Southampton that night. I hadn’t, but I had got to be alone. I went back to my cheap hotel near Euston Station, and went up into the bare, white bedroom, and sat down on the bed. I must have sat there for two hours or more, just staring at the wall ahead of me.
    You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love. You may do it over and over again afterwards, but it’s never the same. When you chuck away what’s given to you that first time, it’s chucked away for good. I started chucking it away when I married Beryl and went off to Egypt, leaving her alone.
    You can be very, very cruel just by acting with restraint, and everyone will say what a good chap you are.
    You can kill somebody just by doing nothing, and be complimented at the inquest.
    You can be absolutely right all through. And what you’ll get for it is a memory of happiness that might have been, if you had acted a bit kinder.
    I might have dozed a bit that night—I don’t know. I know that I heard every hour strike from a church clock outside my room.
    I had to go and report to the Company next day, and that, of course, was at Morden, just by her house. I had to go down again to the same Underground station, and there were the same red buses rattling the same Diesel engines at the bus stop by the entrance where we had said good-bye. She had said, “I’ll be terribly lost without you.” She had been.
    I stood staring at the place by the Metroland poster where I had stood holding her in my arms, stood there in a daze. I had told her that it was only for two years. She had said miserably, “It sounds like as if it was for ever.” It had been.
    It was there that she had stood waving me good-bye.
    I turned away, and walked up the main road through the shopping part before turning off up Aerodrome Lane to the works. And now I was scared stiff that I’d meet her Dad or Mum out doing the shopping, or some of her family. I don’t know why it was, but I was afraid to meet them, and I knew as I walked up to the works that I could never work in that place again. I’d never have the courage to walk round those streets as we had walked together, or go to the picture house that we had used, or lunch in the works canteen where we had