fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on
the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the
garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game,
seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the
coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make
love greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again for
happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two,
how he must keep watch on anything that really menaced that boon. If
Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house there
would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps,
one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon the
red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
She would have shaken her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question of
coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would have
yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word at
such a time could reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dread
of the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case
that the scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she
did in spite of everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed so
well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now
and henceforth, to treat them in her own way.

She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early
convenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art
that his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till after
he left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an
effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the
night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of
the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.
He hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say
to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have
believed that they _could hold out_--hold out, that is, not against
Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated,
made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the
court of the station, how ill a man, and even a