he said when
calmer. 'He can't control his anger against me, and I suffer too much
when I am made to feel like this. I shall take a lodging not far off
where you can see me often.'

'But you have no money, Marian,' replied Mrs Yule, miserably.

'No money? As if I couldn't borrow a few pounds until all my own comes
to me! Dora Milvain can lend me all I shall want; it won't make the
least difference to her. I must have my money very soon now.'

At about half-past eleven Mrs Yule went downstairs, and entered the
study.

'If you are coming to speak about Marian,' said her husband, turning
upon her with savage eyes, 'you can save your breath. I won't hear her
name mentioned.'

She faltered, but overcame her weakness.

'You are driving her away from us, Alfred. It isn't right! Oh, it isn't
right!'

'If she didn't go I should, so understand that! And if I go, you have
seen the last of me. Make your choice, make your choice!'

He had yielded himself to that perverse frenzy which impels a man to
acts and utterances most wildly at conflict with reason. His sense of
the monstrous irrationality to which he was committed completed what was
begun in him by the bitterness of a great frustration.

'If I wasn't a poor, helpless woman,' replied his wife, sinking upon a
chair and crying without raising her hands to her face, 'I'd go and live
with her till she was married, and then make a home for myself. But I
haven't a penny, and I'm too old to earn my own living; I should only be
a burden to her.'

'That shall be no hindrance,' cried Yule. 'Go, by all means; you shall
have a sufficient allowance as long as I can continue to work, and when
I'm past that, your lot will be no harder than mine. Your daughter had
the chance of making provision for my old age, at no expense to herself.
But that was asking too much of her. Go, by all means, and leave me to
make what I can of the rest of my life; perhaps I may save a few years
still from the curse brought upon me by my own folly.'

It was idle to address him. Mrs Yule went into the sitting-room, and
there sat weeping for an hour. Then she extinguished the lights, and
crept upstairs in silence.

Yule passed the night in the study. Towards morning he slept for an hour
or two, just long enough to let the fire go out and to get thoroughly
chilled. When he opened his eyes a muddy twilight had begun to show at
the window; the sounds of a clapping door within the house, which had
proba