iality of her case.

He went upstairs very softly to his room. In a jar on the chimney-piece
he found a small key. Still going softly, he let himself into the little
unfurnished room over the porch where boxes were stored. Among them was
the trunk which contained Violet's long-abandoned clothes. He unlocked
it, rummaged, deliberated, selected finally a serge skirt, draggled but
warm; a pair of woolen stockings, and shoes, stout for all their
shabbiness.

And as he knelt over the trunk his mind cleared suddenly, and he knew
what he was going to do. He was going to fetch a cab, if he could get
one, and take her away in it. If she was staying in London he would take
her straight back to whatever place she had come from. If she came from
a distance he would see her started on her journey home. He was
prepared, if necessary, to hang about for hours in any station, waiting
for any train that would remove her. If the worst came to the worst he
would take a room for her in some hotel and leave her there. But he
would not have her sitting with him till past midnight in his house. It
was too risky. He knew what he was about. He knew that there was danger
in any course that could give rise to the suspicion of cohabitation. He
knew, not only that cohabitation in itself was fatal, but that the
injured husband who invoked the law must refrain from the very
appearance of that evil.

Of course, he knew what Violet had come for. She was beginning to get
uneasy about her divorce. And, personally, he couldn't see where the
risk came in unless the suit was defended. And it wasn't going to be
defended. It couldn't be. The suspicion of collusion would in his case
be a far more dangerous thing. It was what he had been specially warned
against.

These two ideas, collusion and cohabitation, struggled for supremacy in
Ranny's brain. They seemed to him mutually exclusive; and all it came to
was that, with his suit so imminent, he couldn't be too careful. He must
not, even for the sake of decency, show Violet any consideration that
would be prejudicial to his case.

Whereupon it struck him that the most perilous, most embarrassing detail
of the situation was the disgusting accident of the weather. In common
decency he couldn't have turned her out of doors in that rain.

And under all the confused working of his intelligence his instinct told
him that what happened was not an accident at all. His inmost prescience
hinted at foredoomed, irrem