She took up a
scientific paper from the heap on the table, and pretended to begin
reading it. Cyril rose and tried to kiss her, but she pushed him away
with an impatient gesture. "Never," she said haughtily. "Never, Cyril,
until you choose to tell me your private secret." Cyril sank back gloomily into his chair, folded his hands into one
another in a despondent fashion, and looked hard at the vacant ceiling
without uttering a single word. As Netta held the paper aimlessly before her that minute, by the merest
chance her eye happened to fall upon her husband's name printed in the
article that lay open casually at the middle page. Even at that supreme
moment of chagrin and torturing doubt, she could not pass by Cyril's
name in print without stopping to read what was said about him. As she
did so, she saw that the article began by hostile criticism of the
position he had taken up on the distinction between birds and reptiles
in a recent paper contributed to the Transactions of the Linnæan
Society. She rose from her place silently, put the paper into his hands
and pointed to the paragraph with her white forefinger, but never
uttered a single syllable. Cyril took it from her mechanically, and read
on, not half thinking what he was reading, till he came to a passage
which attracted his attention perforce, because it ran somewhat after
this fashion--

"Professor Milliter would have written a little less confidently had he
been aware that almost while his words were passing through the press a
very singular discovery bearing upon this exact subject was being laid
before the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. Dr. Hermann von Meyer has just
exhibited to that body a slab of lithographic slate from the famous
oolitic quarry at Solenhofen, containing the impression of a most
remarkable organism, which he has named _Archæopteryx lithographica_. This extraordinary creature has the feathers of a bird with the tail of
a lizard; it is entirely destitute of an _os coccygis_; it has
apparently two conical teeth in the upper jaw; and its foot is that of a
characteristic percher." And so forth for more than a column, full of
those minute anatomical points which Cyril had himself carefully noticed
in the anatomy of his own English specimen. As he read and re-read that awful paragraph, Netta looking on at him
half angrily all the time, he grew more and more certain every moment
that the German professor had simultaneously made the very same
discovery as himself. He drew a long sigh of relief. The worst was over;
the murder was out, then; it was not to be he who should bear the
responsibility of publishing to the world the existence and
peculiarities of that wicked and hateful fossil. A cold-blooded German
geologist had done so already, with no more trace of remorse and
punctiliousness in the business than if it had been the merest old
oyster-shell or spider or commonplace cockroach! He could hardly keep in
his excited feelings; the strain of personal responsibility at least was
lightened; and though the universe remained as black as ever, he could
at any rate wash his own hands of the horrid creature. Unmanly as it may
seem, he burst suddenly into tears, and stepped across the room to throw
his arms round Netta's neck. To his surprise--for he scarcely remembered
that she could not yet realize the situation--Netta repelled him with
both hands stretched angrily before her, palm outwards. "Netta," he said, imploringly, recognizing immediately what it was she
meant, "come with me now into the laboratory, and see what it is that I
have got in the cupboard." Netta, all trembling and wondering, followed him in a perfect flutter of
doubt and anxiety. Cyril slowly unlocked the cupboard, then unfastened a
small drawer, and last of all took out a long flat object, wrapped up
mysteriously in a clean handkerchief. He laid it down reluctantly upon
the table, and Netta, amazed and puzzled, beheld a small smooth slab of
soft clay-stone, scored with what seemed like the fossil marks of a few
insignificant bones and feathers. The little woman drew a long breath. "Well, Cyril?" she said interrogatively, looking at it in a dubious
mood. "Why, Netta," cried her husband, half angry at her incomprehensible
calmness, "don't you see what it is? It's terrible, terrible!" "A fossil, Cyril, isn't it? A bird, I should say." "No, not a bird, Netta; nor yet a lizard; but that half-way thing, that
intermediate link you read about just now over yonder in the paper." "But why do you hide it, Cyril? You haven't taken it anywhere from a
museum." "Oh, Netta! Don't you understand? Don't you see the implications? It's a
creature, half bird and half reptile, and it proves, absolutely proves,
Netta, beyond the faintest possibility of a doubt, that the
evolutionists are quite right--quite scientific. And if it once comes to
be generally recognized, I don't know, I'm sure, what is ever to become
of religion and of science. We shall every one of us have to go and turn
evolutionists!" It is very sad to relate, but poor Netta, her pent-up feelings all let
loose by the smallness of the evil, as it seemed to her, actually began
to smile, and then to laugh merrily, in the very face of this awful
revelation. "Then you haven't really got tired of me, Cyril?" she cried
eagerly. "You're not in love with somebody else? You don't regret ever
having married me?" Cyril stared at her in mute surprise. What possible connection could
these questions have with the momentous principles bound up implicitly
in the nature-printed skeleton of _Archæopteryx lithographica_? It was a
moment or so before he could grasp the association of ideas in her
womanly little brain, and understand the real origin of her natural
wife-like fears and hesitations. "Oh, Cyril," she said again, after a minute's pause, looking at the
tell-tale fossil with another bright girlish smile, "is it only that? Only that wretched little creature? Oh, darling, I am so happy!" And she
threw her arms around his neck of her own accord, and kissed him
fervently twice or thrice over. Cyril was pleased indeed that she had recovered her trust in him so
readily, but amazed beyond measure that she could look at that horrible
anti-scriptural fossil absolutely without the slightest symptom of
flinching. "What a blessed thing it must be," he thought to himself, "to
be born a woman! Here's the whole universe going to rack and ruin,
physically and spiritually, before her very eyes, and she doesn't care a
fig as soon as she's quite satisfied in her own mind that her own
particular husband hasn't incomprehensibly fallen in love with one or
other of the Mortiscombe ladies!" It was gratifying to his personal
feelings, doubtless; but it wasn't at all complimentary, one must admit,
to the general constitution of the universe. "What ought I to do with it, Netta?" he asked her simply, pointing to
the fossil; glad to have any companionship, even if so unsympathetic, in
his hitherto unspoken doubts and difficulties.