her own face on the cushioned arm. So for
a minute their smothered sobs only filled the room. But he made out,
through this disorder, where he had put down his hat; his stick and his
new tan-coloured gloves--they had cost two-and-thruppence and would
have represented sacrifices--were on the chair beside it He picked these
articles up and all silently and softly--gasping, that is, but quite on
tiptoe--reached the door and let himself out.

VI

Off there on the bench of desolation a week later she made him a more
particular statement, which it had taken the remarkably tense interval
to render possible. After leaving her at the hotel that last Sunday he
had gone forth in his reaggravated trouble and walked straight before
him, in the teeth of the west wind, close to the iron rails of the
stretched Marina and with his telltale face turned from persons
occasionally met, and toward the surging sea. At the Land's End, even in
the confirmed darkness and the perhaps imminent big blow, his immemorial
nook, small shelter as it yielded, had again received him; and it was
in the course of this heedless session, no doubt, where the agitated air
had nothing to add to the commotion within him, that he began to look
his extraordinary fortune a bit straighter in the face and see it
confess itself at once a fairy-tale and a nightmare That, visibly,
confoundingly, she was still attached to him (attached in fact was a
mild word!) and that the unquestionable proof of it was in this offered
pecuniary salve, of the thickest composition, for his wounds and sores
and shames--these things were the fantastic fable, the tale of money
in handfuls, that he seemed to have only to stand there and swallow
and digest and feel himself full-fed by; but the whole of the rest
was nightmare, and most of all nightmare his having thus to thank one
through whom Nan and his little girls had known torture.

He didn't care for himself now, and this unextinguished and apparently
inextinguishable charm by which he had held her was a fact incredibly
romantic; but he gazed with a longer face than he had ever had for
anything in the world at his potential acceptance of a great bouncing
benefit from the person he intimately, if even in a manner indirectly,
associated with the conditions to which his lovely wife and his children
(who would have been so lovely too) had pitifully succumbed. He had
accepted the social relation--which meant he had taken even that on