nd there'd be an end of it?"

She went a trifle paler, but displayed no fear. "Don't you dare!" she
said between her teeth. "I'd leave you next day."

Again he went a little way up the corridor, but stopped before the
aloof reserve of her look.

"Believe me," she said gravely, "I couldn't stand you."

He bit his lip sharply. "It's dangerous, you know, what you're doing.
I told you last night men are natural animals all the world over. I
shan't stand being turned down like this for ever; it's absurd,
unnatural; it's preposterous after we've been married all these years.
I tell you what you're doing is not safe. You'll drive me elsewhere."

"Make your own life," she said, with a cheerful indifference; "I have
all I want in mine."

Osborn turned away with a sharp exclamation; and heard her door click
behind her while he still stood in the corridor.

"That's that!" he breathed hard.

The next morning he took a bag with him and in the afternoon he wired
home: "Shall not be back for dinner."

She read the telegram, uncaring. Two years ago it would have made her
fear. She would have trembled over it; her heart would have leapt as
at a thunderbolt; she would have run to her glass and reckoned with
the sallowness of her face, the little lines about her eyes, each
representing little anxieties about little things; her chapped hands
and her dull wits. She would have thought of the other women, the
hundreds of them, the younger, freer and fresher women who passed him
by every day in the streets. But now she smiled; she felt awfully old,
experienced in reading under and between the brief message.

She mused: "Tactics! How funny men are! Can he think I'll mind?"

It occurred to her, too, that perhaps it was not tactics; perhaps he
genuinely quested in other directions; perhaps, already, she had
driven him elsewhere. And still she was unmoved; she could not care.
She longed to care very deeply, tragically, to thrill to the pulse of
life again, but she could not. She even told herself that she was a
little glad on his behalf and her own, if such was the solution. As
she went in to dinner, and seated herself at the solitary table, she
liked it; privacy had returned to her. This was almost like the year
of her grass-widowhood.

CHAPTER XXIV

FOOL'S CAP

Osborn visited a smart flower shop when he went out to lunch and
ordered carnations, a generous sheaf of them, to be sent to Miss
Roselle Dates at the Piccadilly