did happen was the most unanticipated and incredible experience of
my life. It was as if the whole world of mankind were suddenly to turn
upside down and people go about calmly in positions of complete
inversion. I had a note from Mary on the morning after this discovery
that indeed dealt with that but was otherwise not very different from
endless notes I had received before our crisis. It was destroyed, so
that I do not know its exact text now, but it did not add anything
material to the situation, or give me the faintest shadow to intimate
what crept close upon us both. She repeated her strangely thwarting
refusal to come away and live with me. She seemed indignant that we had
been discovered--as though Justin had indulged in an excess of existence
by discovering us. I completed and despatched to her a long letter I had
already been writing overnight in which I made clear the hopeless
impossibility of her attitude, vowed all my life and strength to her,
tried to make some picture of the happiness that was possible for us
together, sketched as definitely as I could when and where we might meet
and whither we might go. It must have made an extraordinary jumble of
protest, persuasion and practicality. It never reached her; it was
intercepted by Justin.

I have gathered since that after I left Martens he sent telegrams to Guy
and Philip and her cousin Lord Tarvrille. He was I think amazed beyond
measure at this revelation of the possibilities of his cold and distant
wife, with a vast passion of jealousy awaking in him, and absolutely
incapable of forming any plan to meet the demands of his extraordinary
situation. Guy and Philip got to him that night, Tarvrille came down
next morning, and Martens became a debate. Justin did not so much
express views and intentions as have them extracted from him; it was
manifest he was prepared for the amplest forgiveness of his wife if only
I could be obliterated from their world. Confronted with her brothers,
the two men in the world who could be frankly brutal to her, Mary's
dignity suffered; she persisted she meant to go on seeing me, but she
was reduced to passionate tears.

Into some such state of affairs I came that morning on the heels of my
letter, demanding Lady Mary of a scared evasive butler.

Maxton and Tarvrille appeared: "Hullo, Stratton!" said Tarvrille, with a
fine flavor of an agreeable chance meeting. Philip had doubts about his
greeting me, and then extended his relu