she would miss Stevie at
first, he felt greatly concerned about her health and spirits. How would
she stand her solitude--absolutely alone in that house? It would not do
for her to break down while he was locked up? What would become of the
shop then? The shop was an asset. Though Mr Verloc's fatalism accepted
his undoing as a secret agent, he had no mind to be utterly ruined,
mostly, it must be owned, from regard for his wife.

Silent, and out of his line of sight in the kitchen, she frightened him.
If only she had had her mother with her. But that silly old woman--An
angry dismay possessed Mr Verloc. He must talk with his wife. He could
tell her certainly that a man does get desperate under certain
circumstances. But he did not go incontinently to impart to her that
information. First of all, it was clear to him that this evening was no
time for business. He got up to close the street door and put the gas
out in the shop.

Having thus assured a solitude around his hearthstone Mr Verloc walked
into the parlour, and glanced down into the kitchen. Mrs Verloc was
sitting in the place where poor Stevie usually established himself of an
evening with paper and pencil for the pastime of drawing these
coruscations of innumerable circles suggesting chaos and eternity. Her
arms were folded on the table, and her head was lying on her arms. Mr
Verloc contemplated her back and the arrangement of her hair for a time,
then walked away from the kitchen door. Mrs Verloc's philosophical,
almost disdainful incuriosity, the foundation of their accord in domestic
life made it extremely difficult to get into contact with her, now this
tragic necessity had arisen. Mr Verloc felt this difficulty acutely. He
turned around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large
animal in a cage.

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation,--a systematically
incurious person remains always partly mysterious. Every time he passed
near the door Mr Verloc glanced at his wife uneasily. It was not that he
was afraid of her. Mr Verloc imagined himself loved by that woman. But
she had not accustomed him to make confidences. And the confidence he
had to make was of a profound psychological order. How with his want of
practice could he tell her what he himself felt but vaguely: that there
are conspiracies of fatal destiny, that a notion grows in a mind
sometimes till it acquires an outward existence, an independent power