examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes. For she
had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because
it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from
within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly
because she liked to look well in Richard's eyes; that this had served
Roger's end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt. She hurried
back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him
as he sobbed out his ridiculous story: "Oh, mummie, I never would have
done it if I hadn't gone mad. You see, mummie, Queenie's such a glorious
woman...."

But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper. He sat up
suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with
pale, desperate eyes. She clapped her hand across her face and then took
it away again, and said softly: "What is it, dear?" But he had sunk into
a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the
oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.
She could get nothing out of him. He obviously did not want her to stay
two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other
hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her
train, "Mummie, I do love you, mummie. I do love you. And thank you,
mummie...." But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of
his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll
of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course. For
since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not
love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and space,
there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had
always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....

But had it? For after all, nothing dreadful had happened. Roger had
written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his
allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must
try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a
situation in another town which he did not name. That was the last they
heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his
holidays. Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an
increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at
first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and t