uld have told her that he had
turned a page.

And all the time she kept on saying to herself, "He _was_ thinking
about Gwenda. He's sorry for Alice because of Gwenda, not because of
me. It isn't _my_ people that he's good to."

The thought went round and round in Mary's mind, troubling its
tranquillity.

She knew that something followed from it, but she refused to see it.
Her mind thrust from it the conclusion. "Then it's Gwenda that he
cares for." She said to herself, "After all I'm married to him." And
as she said it she thrust up her chin in a gesture of assurance and
defiance.

In the chair that faced her Rowcliffe shifted his position. He crossed
his legs and the tilted foot kicked out, urged by a hidden savagery.
The clicking of Mary's needles maddened him.

He glanced at her. She was knitting a silk tie for his birthday.

She saw the glance. The fierceness of the small fingers slackened;
they knitted off a row or two, then ceased. Her hands lay quiet in her
lap.

She leaned her head against the back of the chair. Her grieved eyes
let down their lids before the smouldering hostility in his.

Her stillness and her shut eyes moved him to compunction. They
appeased him with reminiscence, with suggestion of her smooth and
innocent sleep.

He had been thinking of what she had done to him; of how she had lied
to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out
to him in her agony. The thought of Mary's turpitude had consoled him
mysteriously. Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he
had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he was poisoned
with it.

For the sting of it and the violence of his own resentment were more
tolerable to Rowcliffe than the stale, dull realisation of the fact
that Mary bored him. It had come to that. He had nothing to say to
Mary now that he had married her. His romantic youth still moved
uneasily within him; it found no peace in an armchair, facing Mary.
He dreaded these evenings that he was compelled to spend with her. He
dreaded her speech. He dreaded her silences ten times more. They no
longer soothed him. They were pervading, menacing, significant.

He thought that Mary's turpitude accounted for and justified the
exasperation of his nerves.

Now as he looked at her, lying back in the limp pose reminiscent of
her sleep, he thought, "Poor thing. Poor Molly." He put down his book.
He stood over her a moment, sighed a long sigh like a y