t till the trees of the Square even were
barely visible from the dining-room window.

He ate steadily, but at times a sensation as though he could not swallow
attacked him. Had he been right to yield to his overmastering hunger of
the night before, and break down the resistance which he had suffered
now too long from this woman who was his lawful and solemnly constituted
helpmate?

He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face, from before
which, to soothe her, he had tried to pull her hands--of her terrible
smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still
seemed to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling
of remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the
flame of the single candle, before silently slinking away.

And somehow, now that he had acted like this, he was surprised at
himself.

Two nights before, at Winifred Dartie's, he had taken Mrs. MacAnder
into dinner. She had said to him, looking in his face with her
sharp, greenish eyes: "And so your wife is a great friend of that Mr.
Bosinney's?"

Not deigning to ask what she meant, he had brooded over her words.

They had roused in him a fierce jealousy, which, with the peculiar
perversion of this instinct, had turned to fiercer desire.

Without the incentive of Mrs. MacAnder's words he might never have done
what he had done. Without their incentive and the accident of finding
his wife's door for once unlocked, which had enabled him to steal upon
her asleep.

Slumber had removed his doubts, but the morning brought them again. One
thought comforted him: No one would know--it was not the sort of thing
that she would speak about.

And, indeed, when the vehicle of his daily business life, which needed
so imperatively the grease of clear and practical thought, started
rolling once more with the reading of his letters, those nightmare-like
doubts began to assume less extravagant importance at the back of his
mind. The incident was really not of great moment; women made a fuss
about it in books; but in the cool judgment of right-thinking men, of
men of the world, of such as he recollected often received praise in
the Divorce Court, he had but done his best to sustain the sanctity of
marriage, to prevent her from abandoning her duty, possibly, if she were
still seeing Bosinney, from....

No, he did not regret it.

Now that the first step towards reconciliation had been taken, the rest
would b