f on his elbow. He could just see
her where she glimmered, and her braid of hair, uncoiled, hanging to her
waist. Up till now he had been profoundly unhappy and ashamed, but
something in the unconquerable obstinacy of her attitude appealed to the
devil that lived in him, a devil of untimely and disastrous humour. The
right thing, he felt, was not to appear as angry as he was. He sat up on
his pillow, and began to talk to her with genial informality.

"See here,--I suppose you want an explanation. But don't you think we'd
better wait until we're up? Up and dressed, I mean. I can't talk
seriously before I've had a bath and--and brushed my hair. You see,
you've taken rather an unfair advantage of me by getting out of bed."
(He paused for an answer, and still no answer came.)--"Don't imagine I'm
ignobly lying down all the time, wrapped in a blanket. I'm sitting on my
pillow. I know there's any amount to be said. But how do you suppose I'm
going to say it if I've got to stay here, all curled up like a blessed
Buddha, and you're planted away over there like a monument of all the
Christian virtues? Are you coming back to bed, or are you not?"

She shivered. To her mind his flippancy, appalling in the circumstances,
sufficiently revealed the man he was. The man she had known and married
had never existed. For she had married Walter Majendie believing him to
be good. The belief had been so rooted in her that nothing but his own
words or his own silence could have cast it out. She had loved Walter
Majendie; but it was another man who called to her, and she would not
listen to him. She felt that she could never go back to that man, never
sit in the same room, or live in the same house with him again. She would
have to make up her mind what she would do, eventually. Meanwhile, to get
away from him, to sit there in the cold, inflexible, insensitive, to
obtain a sort of spiritual divorce from him, while she martyrised her
body which was wedded to him, that was the young, despotic instinct she
obeyed.

"If you won't come," he said, "I suppose it only remains for me to go."

He got up, took Anne's cloak from the door where it hung, and put it
tenderly about her shoulders.

"Whatever happens or unhappens," he said, "we must be dressed."

He found her slippers, and thrust them on her passive feet. She lay back
and closed her eyes. From the movements that she heard, she gathered that
Walter was getting into his clothes. Once, as he s