lifting his
eyes from his plate; brooding over their separation. He was wondering
whether, after all, it had been so inevitable; whether he had
misunderstood her; whether, if he had had the sense to understand, he
might not have kept her. It was possible she had been wounded by his
absences. He had never explained them. He could not tell her that she
had made him afraid to be alone with her.

The situation, which he had accepted so obediently, had been more than
a mere mortal man could endure. Especially in the terrible five minutes
after dinner, before they settled for the evening, when each sat waiting
to see if the other had anything to say. Sometimes Majendie would take up
his book and Anne her work. She would sew, and sew, patient, persistent,
in her tragic silence. And when he could bear it no longer, he would put
down his book and go quietly away, to relieve the intolerable constraint
that held her. Sometimes it was Anne who read, while he smoked and
brooded. Then, in the warm, consenting stillness of the summer evenings
(they were now in June), her presence seemed to fill the room; he was
possessed by the sense of it; by the sound of her breathing; by the
stirring of her body in the chair, or of her fingers on the pages of her
book; and he would get up suddenly and leave her, dragging his passion
from the sight of her.

As he considered these things, many perplexities, many tendernesses,
stirred in him and kept him still.

Anne watched him from the other end of the table, and her thoughts
debased him. He seemed to her disagreeably incommunicative, and she had
found an ignoble explanation of his mood. There had been too much salt in
the soup, and now there was something wrong with the salmon. He had not
responded to her apology for these accidents, and she supposed that they
had been enough to spoil his evening with her.

She had come to consider him a creature grossly wedded to material
things.

"It's a pity you stayed," said she. "Mrs. Hannay would have given you a
better dinner."

He had nothing to say to so preposterous a charge. His eyes were fixed
more than ever on his plate. She saw his face flush as he bowed his head
in eating; she allowed her fancy to rest in its morbid abhorrence of the
act, and in its suspicion of its grossness. She went on, lashed by her
fancy. "I cannot understand your liking to go there so much, when you
might go to the Eliotts or the Gardners. They're always asking you, and