o gaze after
him, she saw him cross the hall and go out into the night without his
hat and coat, the amazed servants staring after him.

She drew back to go up-stairs, and met her husband coming slowly out of
the study. He looked steadily at her, as she clung trembling to the
banisters. There was no alteration in his glance, and she suddenly
perceived that what he knew now he had always known. She put her hand to
her head.

"You look tired," he said, in the level voice to which she was
accustomed. "You had better go to bed."

She stumbled swiftly up-stairs, catching at the banisters, and went into
her own room.

Her maid was waiting for her by the dressing-table with its shaded
electric lights. And she remembered that she had given a party, and that
she had on her diamonds.

It would take a long time to unfasten them. She pulled at the diamond
sun on her breast with a shaking hand. Her husband had given it to her
when her eldest son was born. Her maid took the tiara gently out of her
hair, and cut the threads that sewed the diamonds on her breast and
shoulders. Would it never end? The lace of her gown, cautiously
withdrawn through its hundred eyelet-holes, knotted itself.

"Cut it," she said, impatiently. "Cut it."

At last she was in her dressing-gown and alone. She flung herself face
downwards on the sofa. Her attitude had the touch of artificiality which
was natural to her.

The deluge had arrived, and unconsciously she met it, as she would have
made a heroine meet it had she been a novelist, in a white dressing-gown
and pink ribbons in a stereotyped attitude of despair on a divan.

Conscience is supposed to make cowards of us all, but it is a matter of
common experience that the unimaginative are made cowards of only by
being found out.

Had David qualms of conscience when Uriah fell before the besieged city?
Surely if he had he would have winced at the obvious parallel of the
prophet's story about the ewe lamb. But apparently he remained serenely
obtuse till the indignant author's "Thou art the man" unexpectedly
nailed him to the cross of his sin.

And so it was with Lady Newhaven. She had gone through the twenty-seven
years of her life believing herself to be a religious and virtuous
person. She was so accustomed to the idea that it had become a habit,
and now the whole of her self-respect was in one wrench torn from her.
The events of the last year had not worn it down to its last shred, had
not ev