haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling of
remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the flame of
the single candle, before silently slinking away.

And somehow, now that he had acted like this, he was surprised at
himself.

Two nights before, at Winifred Dartie's, he had taken Mrs. MacAnder into
dinner. She had said to him, looking in his face with her sharp,
greenish eyes: "And so your wife is a great friend of that Mr.
Bosinney's?"

Not deigning to ask what she meant, he had brooded over her words.

They had roused in him a fierce jealousy, which, with the peculiar
perversion of this instinct, had turned to fiercer desire.

Without the incentive of Mrs. MacAnder's words he might never have done
what he had done. Without their incentive and the accident of finding
his wife's door for once unlocked, which had enabled him to steal upon
her asleep.

Slumber had removed his doubts, but the morning brought them again. One
thought comforted him: No one would know--it was not the sort of thing
that she would speak about.

And, indeed, when the vehicle of his daily business life, which needed so
imperatively the grease of clear and practical thought, started rolling
once more with the reading of his letters, those nightmare-like doubts
began to assume less extravagant importance at the back of his mind. The
incident was really not of great moment; women made a fuss about it in
books; but in the cool judgment of right-thinking men, of men of the
world, of such as he recollected often received praise in the Divorce
Court, he had but done his best to sustain the sanctity of marriage, to
prevent her from abandoning her duty, possibly, if she were still seeing
Bosinney, from....

No, he did not regret it.

Now that the first step towards reconciliation had been taken, the rest
would be comparatively--comparatively....

He, rose and walked to the window. His nerve had been shaken. The sound
of smothered sobbing was in his ears again. He could not get rid of it.

He put on his fur coat, and went out into the fog; having to go into the
City, he took the underground railway from Sloane Square station.

In his corner of the first-class compartment filled with City men the
smothered sobbing still haunted him, so he opened the Times with the rich
crackle that drowns all lesser sounds, and, barricaded behind it, set
himself steadily to con the news.

He read that a Recorder had charged a grand jur