er own nice, comfortable home a whole week before Frank expected her
back.

Agnes sometimes acted like that--on a quick impulse; she did so to her
own undoing on that dull, rainy day.

When she reached Summerfield, it was to find her telegram to her husband
lying unopened on the hall table of The Haven. Frank, it seemed, had
slept in town the night before. Not that that mattered, so she told
herself gleefully, full of the pleasant joy of being again in her own
home; the surprise would be the greater and the more welcome when Frank
did come back.

Having nothing better to do that first afternoon, Agnes had gone
up to her husband's dressing-room in order to look over his summer
clothes before sending them to the cleaner. In her careful,
playing-at-housewifely fashion, she had turned out the pockets
of his cricketing coat. There, a little to her surprise, she had
found three letters, and idle curiosity as to Frank's invitations
during her long stay away--Frank was deservedly popular with the
ladies of Summerfield and, indeed, with all women--caused her to
take the three letters out of their envelopes.

In a moment--how terrible that it should take but a moment to shatter
the fabric of a human being's innocent House of Life!--Agnes had seen
what had happened to her--to him. For each of these letters, written in
the same sloping woman's hand, was a love letter signed "Janey"; and in
each the writer, in a plaintive, delicate, but insistent and reproachful
way, asked Frank for money.

Even now, though nearly seven weeks had gone by since then, Agnes could
recall with painful vividness the sick, cold feeling that had come over
her--a feeling of fear rather than anger, of fear and desperate
humiliation.

Locking the door of the dressing-room, she had searched eagerly--a
dishonourable thing to do, as she knew well. And soon she had found
other letters--letters and bills; bills of meals at restaurants, showing
that her husband and a companion had constantly dined and supped at the
Savoy, the Carlton, and Prince's. To those restaurants where he had
taken her, Agnes, two or three times a year, laughing and grumbling at
the expense, he had taken this--this _person_ again and again in the
short time his wife had been away.

As to the further letters, all they proved was that Frank had first met
"Janey Cartwright" over some law business of hers, connected--even Agnes
saw the irony of it--in some shameful way with another man;