f his own. And when all the packing was done he would still
have to go into things.

By the things he had to go into he meant the drawers and the cupboards
in his wife's room.

And such things! It was as if the whole tale of her adultery, with all
its secret infamy, its squalor, its utter callousness, was there in that
room of the love-knots and the rosebuds.

In the locked wardrobe--the key was on the chimney piece where he could
find it--he came on her old skirts, draggled and torn and stained as he
had known them, on the muslin gown of last year, loathsome and limp,
bent like a hanged corpse; and on her very nightgown of the other night,
dreadfully familiar, shrinking, poor ghost of an abomination, in its
corner. And under them, in a row, the shoes that her feet had gone in,
misshapen, trodden down at heel, gaping to deliver up her shame.

These things Winny had collected and put away in order, and hidden out
of his sight as best she could. Seeing, she too, the tale they told, she
had hung a sheet in front of them and locked the door on them and laid
the key aside, to break in some degree the shock of them. For they were
things that had been good enough for him, but not good enough for
Violet's lover. She had gone to him in all her bravery, leaving them
behind, not caring who found them.

And there was more to be gone through before he had finished with it.
There were the drawers, crammed with little things, the collars, the
ribbons and the laces, and one or two trinkets that he had given her,
cast off with the rest, all folded and tidied by Winny, smoothed and
coaxed out of the memories they held, the creases that betrayed the
slattern; and with them, tucked away by Winny, defiled beyond
redemption, almost beyond recognition, the sachet, smelling of violets
and with the word "Violet" sprawling all across it in embroidery.

All these things, the dresses, the shoes, and the rest of them, he
gathered up in handfuls and flung into an old trunk which he locked and
pushed under the bed.

Then he set his teeth and went on with his task. In the soiled linen
basket, among his own handkerchiefs as he counted them, he found one
queerly scented and of a strange, arresting pattern. It had the monogram
"L. M." stitched into the corner. She must have borrowed it from the
beast. Or else--the beast had been in the house and had left it there.

That finished him.

* * * * *

Finished as he w