m to avoid, for the Squire said
suddenly:

"I suppose you saw that woman?"

And Mrs. Pendyce murmured:

"Yes."

She soon went to her room, and had barely got into bed when he appeared,
saying as though ashamed:

"I'm very early."

She lay awake, and every now and then the Squire would ask her, "Are you
asleep, Margery?" hoping that she might have dropped off, for he himself
could not sleep. And she knew that he meant to be nice to her, and she
knew, too, that as he lay awake, turning from side to side, he was
thinking like herself: 'What's to be done next?' And that his fancy,
too, was haunted by a ghost, high-shouldered, with little burning eyes,
red hair, and white freckled face. For, save that George was miserable,
nothing was altered, and the cloud of vengeance still hung over Worsted
Skeynes. Like some weary lesson she rehearsed her thoughts: 'Now Horace
can answer that letter of Captain Bellow's, can tell him that George will
not--indeed, cannot--see her again. He must answer it. But will he?'

She groped after the secret springs of her husband's character, turning
and turning and trying to understand, that she might know the best way of
approaching him. And she could not feel sure, for behind all the little
outside points of his nature, that she thought so "funny," yet could
comprehend, there was something which seemed to her as unknown, as
impenetrable as the dark, a sort of thickness of soul, a sort of
hardness, a sort of barbaric-what? And as when in working at her
embroidery the point of her needle would often come to a stop against
stiff buckram, so now was the point of her soul brought to a stop against
the soul of her husband. 'Perhaps,' she thought, 'Horace feels like that
with me.' She need not so have thought, for the Squire never worked
embroideries, nor did the needle of his soul make voyages of discovery.

By lunch-time the next day she had not dared to say a word. 'If I say
nothing,' she thought, 'he may write it of his own accord.'

Without attracting his attention, therefore, she watched every movement
of his morning. She saw him sitting at his bureau with a creased and
crumpled letter, and knew it was Bellew's; and she hovered about, coming
softly in and out, doing little things here and there and in the hall,
outside. But the Squire gave no sign, motionless as the spaniel John
couched along the ground with his nose between his paws.

After lunch she could bear it no long