Tale_
and reflect upon his own life. And moreover it is difficult to estimate
how far the twinges of conscience that Lady Harman was feeling were not
due to an entirely different cause, the falsification of her position by
the lie she had just told Sir Isaac.)

And presently upon this noisy scene in the great pink bedroom, with Sir
Isaac walking about and standing and turning and gesticulating and Lady
Harman clinging on to her dressing-table, and painfully divided between
her new connections, her sense of guilty deception and the deep
instinctive responsibilities of a woman's nature, came, like one of
those rows of dots that are now so frequent and so helpful in the art of
fiction, the surging, deep, assuaging note of Snagsby's gong: Booooooom.
Boom. Boooooom....

"Damn it!" cried Sir Isaac, smiting at the air with both fists clenched
and speaking as though this was Ellen's crowning misdeed, "and we aren't
even dressed for dinner!"

Sec.9

Dinner had something of the stiffness of court ceremonial.

Mrs. Sawbridge, perhaps erring on the side of discretion, had consumed a
little soup and a wing of chicken in her own room. Sir Isaac was down
first and his wife found him grimly astride before the great dining-room
fire awaiting her. She had had her dark hair dressed with extreme
simplicity and had slipped on a blue velvet tea-gown, but she had been
delayed by a visit to the nursery, where the children were now flushed
and uneasily asleep.

Husband and wife took their places at the genuine Sheraton
dining-table--one of the very best pieces Sir Isaac had ever picked
up--and were waited on with a hushed, scared dexterity by Snagsby and
the footman.

Lady Harman and her husband exchanged no remarks during the meal; Sir
Isaac was a little noisy with his soup as became a man who controls
honest indignation, and once he complained briefly in a slightly hoarse
voice to Snagsby about the state of one of the rolls. Between the
courses he leant back in his chair and made faint sounds with his teeth.
These were the only breach of the velvety quiet. Lady Harman was
surprised to discover herself hungry, but she ate with thoughtful
dignity and gave her mind to the attempted digestion of the confusing
interview she had just been through.

It was a very indigestible interview.

On the whole her heart hardened again. With nourishment and silence her
spirit recovered a little from its abasement, and her resolution to
assert h