"

"Dear me! What a fuss! But I might have known my message wouldn't be
delivered. Everything always happens to put me in the wrong with your
family."

With a little air of injured pride she started to go to her room; but he
put out a hand to detain her.

"You've just come from the studio?"

"Yes. It is awfully late? I must go and dress. We're dining with the
Ellings, you know."

"I know... How did you come? In a cab?"

She faced him limpidly. "No; I couldn't find one that would bring me--so
Peter gave me a lift, like an angel. I'm blown to bits. He had his open
car."

Her colour was still high, and Ralph noticed that her lower lip twitched
a little. He had led her to the point they had reached solely to be able
to say: "If you're straight from the studio, how was it that I saw you
coming down from Morningside?"

Unless he asked her that there would be no point in his
cross-questioning, and he would have sacrificed his pride without
a purpose. But suddenly, as they stood there face to face, almost
touching, she became something immeasurably alien and far off, and the
question died on his lips.

"Is that all?" she asked with a slight smile.

"Yes; you'd better go and dress," he said, and turned back to his room.

XVI

The turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the
sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the
notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.

Ralph Marvell, pondering upon this, reflected that for him the sign had
been set, more than three years earlier, in an Italian ilex-grove. That
day his life had brimmed over--so he had put it at the time. He saw now
that it had brimmed over indeed: brimmed to the extent of leaving the
cup empty, or at least of uncovering the dregs beneath the nectar. He
knew now that he should never hereafter look at his wife's hand without
remembering something he had read in it that day. Its surface-language
had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he had seen the warning
letters.

Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his
illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by
the force of his own great need--as a man might breathe a semblance of
life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead. All this
came to him with aching distinctness the morning after his talk with his
wife on the stairs. He had accused himself, in midnig