liberately because she was jealous. She was jealous
of Miss Heydinger because she was stupid. But now these accusations
faded like smoke as he put them forth. But the picture of two little
figures back there in the moonlit past did not fade. It was in the
narrows of Kensington High Street that he abandoned her
arraignment. It was beyond the Town Hall that he made the new
step. Was it, after all, just possible that in some degree he himself
rather was the chief person to blame?

It was instantly as if he had been aware of that all the time.

Once he had made that step, he moved swiftly. Not a hundred paces
before the struggle was over, and he had plunged headlong into the
blue abyss of remorse. And all these things that had been so dramatic
and forcible, all the vivid brutal things he had said, stood no longer
graven inscriptions but in letters of accusing flame. He tried to
imagine he had not said them, that his memory played him a trick;
tried to suppose he had said something similar perhaps, but much less
forcible. He attempted with almost equal futility to minimise his own
wounds. His endeavour served only to measure the magnitude of his
fall.

He had recovered everything now, he saw it all. He recalled Ethel,
sunlit in the avenue, Ethel, white in the moonlight before they parted
outside the Frobisher house, Ethel as she would come out of Lagune's
house greeting him for their nightly walk, Ethel new wedded, as she
came to him through the folding doors radiant in the splendour his
emotions threw about her. And at last, Ethel angry, dishevelled and
tear-stained in that ill-lit, untidy little room. All to the cadence
of a hurdy-gurdy tune! From that to this! How had it been possible to
get from such an opalescent dawning to such a dismal day? What was it
had gone? He and she were the same two persons who walked so brightly
in his awakened memory; he and she who had lived so bitterly through
the last few weeks of misery!

His mood sank for a space to the quality of groaning. He implicated
her now at most as his partner in their failure--"What a mess we have
made of things!" was his new motif. "What a mess!"

He knew love now for what it was, knew it for something more ancient
and more imperative than reason. He knew now that he loved her, and
his recent rage, his hostility, his condemnation of her seemed to him
the reign of some exterior influence in his mind. He thought
incredulously of the long decline in tendern