bickering! Why don't I get out of the room?"

"Come back for a day off with me! It's a funny thing you came back just
in time to get that letter! Before it was delivered! There! Now you
know!"

He was purely amazed. He thought, and his amazement was such that,
characteristically, his anger left him; he thought, "Well, of all
the--!"

But she otherwise interpreted his astonishment. She thought she had made
an advantage and she pressed it. "Perhaps you knew it was coming?"

"How on earth could I have known it was coming?"

She seemed to pause, to be considering. "She might have told you. You
might have seen her."

He said, "As it happens, I did see her. Not three hours before I came
back."

She seemed disappointed. She said, "I know you did. We met Lord Tybar."

And he thought, "Good lord! She was trying to catch me."

She went on, "You never told me you'd met them. Wasn't that funny?"

"If you'd just think a little you'd see there was nothing funny about
it. You found the letter so amazingly funny that, to tell you the truth,
I'd had about enough of the Tybars. And I've had about enough of them."

"I daresay you have--with me. Perhaps you'll tell me this--would you
have told me about the letter if I hadn't seen you get it?"

He thought before he answered and he answered out of his thoughts. He
said slowly, "I--don't--believe--I--would. I wouldn't. I wouldn't
because I'd have known perfectly well that you'd have thought
it--funny."

XII

No answer he could have made could have more exasperated her.
"I--don't--believe--I--would." Deliberation! Something incomprehensible
to her going on in his mind, and as a result of it a statement that no
one on earth (she felt) but he would have made. Any one else would have
said boldly, blusteringly, "Of course I would have told you about the
letter." She would have liked that. She would have disbelieved it and
she could have said, and enjoyed saying, she disbelieved it. Or any one
else would have said furiously, "No, I'm damned if I'd have shown you
the letter." She would have liked that. It would have affirmed her
suspicions that there was "something in it"; and she wished her
suspicions to be affirmed. It would have been something definite.
Something justifiably incentive of anger, of resentment, of jealousy.
Something she could understand.

For she did not understand her husband. That was her grievance against
him. She never had understood him. That den incident