she said, in
a strange voice, "and I know what it looks like there."

He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain. Then he groped in the
darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders to
the coachman. He remembered that May rang twice when she wished to
stop. He pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the
curbstone.

"Why are we stopping? This is not Granny's," Madame Olenska exclaimed.

"No: I shall get out here," he stammered, opening the door and jumping
to the pavement. By the light of a street-lamp he saw her startled
face, and the instinctive motion she made to detain him. He closed the
door, and leaned for a moment in the window.

"You're right: I ought not to have come today," he said, lowering his
voice so that the coachman should not hear. She bent forward, and
seemed about to speak; but he had already called out the order to drive
on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner. The
snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face
as he stood gazing. Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his
lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had
frozen his tears.

He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down
Fifth Avenue to his own house.

XXX.

That evening when Archer came down before dinner he found the
drawing-room empty.

He and May were dining alone, all the family engagements having been
postponed since Mrs. Manson Mingott's illness; and as May was the more
punctual of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded him. He
knew that she was at home, for while he dressed he had heard her moving
about in her room; and he wondered what had delayed her.

He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such conjectures as a means
of tying his thoughts fast to reality. Sometimes he felt as if he had
found the clue to his father-in-law's absorption in trifles; perhaps
even Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions, and had
conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them.

When May appeared he thought she looked tired. She had put on the
low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the Mingott ceremonial
exacted on the most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair
into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in contrast, was wan
and almost faded. But she shone on him with her usual tenderness, and
her eyes had kept the blue dazz