And there
would be only four days to get through till Sunday.

To-night and to-morrow went, and Tanqueray did not write. Jane's heart
began to ache with an intolerable anxiety.

It was on Saturday night that the letter came.

"Dear Jinny," it said. "It was nice of Nina to ask me to supper.
I'm sorry I can't come. I got married yesterday.

"Yrs., G. T.

"P.S.--Nicky saw me through."

Not a word about his wife.

At first the omission did not strike her as significant. It was so like
Tanqueray, to fling you the bare body of a fact while he cherished the
secret soul of it himself. He must have wondered how she would take it.

She took it as she would have taken a telegram from a stranger, telling
her that Tanqueray was dead. She took it, as she would have taken the
stranger's telegram, standing very stiff and very still. She faced, as
it were, an invisible crowd of such strangers, ignorant of the intimacy
of her loss, not recognizing her right to suffer, people whose presence
constrained her to all the observances of decency.

She crushed the note in her hand vindictively, as she would have crushed
that telegram; she pushed it from her, hating the thing that had made
her suffer. Then she drew it to her again; she smoothed it; she examined
it, as she might have examined the telegram, to verify the hour and the
place of the decease, to establish the fact which seemed incredible.

Verification brought the first live pangs that stabbed her. She was
aware of the existence of the woman. There had been a woman all the
time. But she couldn't realize her. She only knew that she meant
finality, separation.

An hour passed. She went to bed. Her footsteps and her movements in
undressing were hushed and slow. She was still like some one who knows
that there has been a death in the house and that the body lies in the
next room. Stretched in her bed, turning her face to the wall to hide
herself, she had that sense of awful contact and of separation, of there
being only a wall between the living and the dead.

The best thing that could have happened to her would have been to lie
awake all night, and let her heart and brain hammer as they would, till
they hammered her to stupefaction. Unfortunately, towards morning she
fell into a sound sleep.

She woke from it with nerves re-charged to the point of torture and a
brain intolerably acute. She saw now all the vivid, poignant things
which last night she had