an
execrable temper, returned to his home.

The little house had an air of bright expectancy, not to say of
festival; it was so intensely, so unusually illuminated. Each window,
with its drawn blind, was a golden square in the ivy-darkened wall.

Tanqueray let himself in noiselessly with his latchkey. He took up the
pile of letters that waited for him on the hat-stand in the hall, and
turned into the dining-room.

It smiled at him brilliantly with all its lights. So did the table, laid
for dinner; the very forks and spoons smiled, twinkling and limping in
irrepressible welcome. A fire burned ostentatiously in the hearth-place.
It sent out at him eager, loquacious tongues of flame, to draw him to
the insufferable endearments of the hearth.

He was aware now that what he was most afraid of in this horrible coming
back was his wife's insupportable affection.

He turned the lights down a little lower. All his movements were
noiseless. He was afraid that Rose would hear him and would come running
down.

He went up-stairs, treading quietly. He meant to take his letters to his
study and read them there. He might even answer some of them. Anything
to stave off the moment when he must meet Rose.

The door of her bedroom was wide open. The light flared so high that he
judged that Rose was in there and about to appear. He swung himself
swiftly and dexterously round the angle of the stair-rail, and so
reached his own door.

She must have heard him go in, but there was no answering movement from
her room.

With a closed door behind him he sat down and looked over his letters.
Bills, proofs from the "Monthly Review," a letter from Laura that
saddened him (he had not realized that Prothero was so ill). Last of
all, at the bottom of the pile, a little note from Rose.

She had got it all into five lines. Five lines, rather straggling,
rather shapeless lines that told him with a surprising brevity that his
wife had decided on an informal separation, for his good.

No resentment, no reproach, no passion and no postscript.

He went down-stairs by no means noiselessly.

In the hall, as he was putting on his hat, Susan came to him. She gave
him a queer look. Dinner was ready, she said. The mistress had ordered
the dinner that he liked. (Irrepressibly, insistently, thick with
intolerable reminiscence, the savour of it streamed through the kitchen
door.) The mistress had cooked it herself, Susan said. The mistress had
told Su