he console in the
ante-chamber. Knowing that monsieur was to come direct here, I brought
it."

"Does Mrs. Braiding know you brought it?"

"Ah! As for Mrs. Braiding, monsieur--"

Marie stopped, disclaiming any responsibility for Mrs. Braiding, of
whom she was somewhat jealous. "I thought to do well."

"I am sure of it. But surely you can see you have been indiscreet.
Don't do it again."

"No, monsieur. I ask pardon of monsieur."

Immediately afterwards he said to Christine in a gay, careless tone:

"And this gas-stove here? Is it all right? Have we tried it? Let us
try it."

"The weather is warm, dearest."

"But just to try it. I always like to satisfy myself--in time."

"Fusser!" she exclaimed, and ignited the stove.

He gazed at it absently, then picked up a cigarette and, taking the
telegram from his pocket, folded it into a spill and with it lit the
cigarette.

"Yes," he said meditatively. "It seems not a bad stove." And he held
the spill till it had burnt to his finger-ends. Then he extinguished
the stove.

She said to herself:

"He has burned the telegram on purpose. But how cleverly he did it!
Ah! That man! There is none but him!"

She was disquieted about the telegram. She feared it. Her
superstitiousness was awakened. She thought of her apostasy from
Catholicism to Protestantism. She thought of a Holy Virgin angered.
And throughout the evening and throughout the night, amid her smiles
and teasings and coaxings and caresses and ecstasies and all her
accomplished, voluptuous girlishness, the image of a resentful Holy
Virgin flitted before her. Why should he burn a business telegram?
Also, was he not at intervals a little absent-minded?

Chapter 40

THE WINDOW

G.J. sat on the oilcloth-covered seat of the large overhanging open
bay-window. Below him was the river, tributary of the Severn; in front
the Old Bridge, with an ancient street rising beyond, and above that
the silhouette of the roofs of Wrikton surmounted by the spire of its
vast church. To the left was the weir, and the cliffs were there also,
and the last tints of the sunset.

Somebody came into the coffee-room. G.J. looked round, hoping that it
might, after all, be Concepcion. But it was Concepcion's maid, Emily,
an imitative young woman who seemed to have caught from her former
employer the quality of strange, sinister provocativeness.

She paused a moment before speaking. Her thin figure was somewhat
indistinct in