oys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the
one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my
devotion to you--I daresay it wouldn't take much to kill it. Perhaps
it's dead already."

No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment
she thought that probably it was truth.

"Eh?" said Lord Holme.

He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered
in shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement,
that overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo
Ulford's midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the
uttermost faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps
her love for him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man.
Had his conceit then no limits?

And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too,
a firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered
Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set
among the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now--? Can there
be two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly
Fritz was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met
him. And he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit.
She called it trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in
her heart too. She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over
his forehead had been white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she
thought that the colour of the red deepened.

"Come here, Fritz," she said softly.

He moved nearer.

"Bend down!"

"Eh?"

"Bend down your head."

He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some
resemblance to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched
the bandage where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp.

A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand
in an obedient attitude, and a woman--was she siren or angel?--was
bathing an ugly wound.

CHAPTER XIV

AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done
before--to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without
weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength,
his animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction.
She had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without
her sense of slavery. Now a change came ove