t finished dinner, and with her was Jane.

When I saw her, lying there smoking in the most comfortable arm-chair as
usual, serene and lazy and pale, Juke's words blazed up between us like a
fire, and I couldn't look at her.

I don't know what we talked about; I expect I was odd and absent. I knew
Katherine was looking at me, with those frosty, piercing, light blue eyes
of hers that saw through, and through, and beyond....

All the time I was saying to myself, 'This won't do. I must chuck it. We
mustn't meet.'

I think Jane talked about _Abraham Lincoln_, which she disliked, and Lady
Pinkerton's experiments in spiritualism, which were rather funny. But I
couldn't have been there for more than half an hour before Jane got up to
go. She had to get home, she said.

I went with her. I didn't mean to, but I did. And here, if any one wants
to know why I regard 'being in love' as a disastrous kink in the mental
machinery, is the reason. It impels you to do things against all your
reasoned will and intentions. My madness drove me out with Jane, drove me
to see her home by the Hampstead tube, to walk across the Vale of Health
with her in the moonlight, to go in with her, and upstairs to the
drawing-room.

All this time we had talked little, and of common, superficial things.
But now, as I stood in the long, dimly-lit room and watched Jane take off
her hat, drop it on a table, and stand for a moment with her back to me,
turning over the evening post, I knew that I must somehow have it out,
have things clear and straight between us. It seemed to me to be the only
way of striking any sort of a path through the intricate difficulties of
our future relations.

'Jane,' I said, and she turned and looked at me with questioning
gray eyes.

At that I had no words for explanation or anything else: I could only
repeat, 'Jane. Jane. Jane,' like a fool.

She said, very low, 'Yes, Arthur,' as if she were assenting to some
statement I had made, as perhaps she was.

I somehow found that I had caught her hands in mine, and so we stood
together, but still I said nothing but 'Jane,' because that was all that,
for the moment, I knew.

Hobart stood in the open doorway, looking at us, white and quiet.

'Good-evening,' he said.

We fell apart, loosing each other's hands.

'You're early back, Oliver,' said Jane, composedly.

'Earlier, obviously,' he returned, 'than I was expected.'

My anger, my hatred, my contempt for him and my own