rning dark.

"God made me as I am," she said; "wicked if you like--but not so wicked
that I'll give myself again to a man I hate."

The sunlight gleamed on her hair as she moved away, and seemed to lay a
caress all down her clinging cream-coloured frock.

Soames could neither speak nor move. That word 'hate'--so extreme, so
primitive--made all the Forsyte in him tremble. With a deep imprecation
he strode away from where she had vanished, and ran almost into the arms
of the lady sauntering back--the fool, the shadowing fool!

He was soon dripping with perspiration, in the depths of the Bois.

'Well,' he thought, 'I need have no consideration for her now; she has
not a grain of it for me. I'll show her this very day that she's my wife
still.'

But on the way home to his hotel, he was forced to the conclusion that
he did not know what he meant. One could not make scenes in public, and
short of scenes in public what was there he could do? He almost cursed
his own thin-skinnedness. She might deserve no consideration; but
he--alas! deserved some at his own hands. And sitting lunchless in the
hall of his hotel, with tourists passing every moment, Baedeker in hand,
he was visited by black dejection. In irons! His whole life, with every
natural instinct and every decent yearning gagged and fettered, and all
because Fate had driven him seventeen years ago to set his heart upon
this woman--so utterly, that even now he had no real heart to set on any
other! Cursed was the day he had met her, and his eyes for seeing in her
anything but the cruel Venus she was! And yet, still seeing her with the
sunlight on the clinging China crepe of her gown, he uttered a little
groan, so that a tourist who was passing, thought: 'Man in pain! Let's
see! what did I have for lunch?'

Later, in front of a cafe near the Opera, over a glass of cold tea with
lemon and a straw in it, he took the malicious resolution to go and dine
at her hotel. If she were there, he would speak to her; if she were not,
he would leave a note. He dressed carefully, and wrote as follows:

"Your idyll with that fellow Jolyon Forsyte is known to me at all
events. If you pursue it, understand that I will leave no stone unturned
to make things unbearable for him. 'S. F.'"

He sealed this note but did not address it, refusing to write the maiden
name which she had impudently resumed, or to put the word Forsyte on the
envelope lest she should tear it up unread. Then he we