The woman threw herself
between them.

"For Heaven's sake," she cried, "listen to me! I have done no wrong. I
have done no wrong now--I never did you wrong, so help me God!"

Mr. Ducksmith laughed again, and his laugh re-echoed round the quiet
walls and up the vast staircase of honour.

"You'd be a fool not to say it. But now I've done with you. Here, you,
sir. Take her away--do what you like with her; I'll divorce her. I'll
give you a thousand pounds never to see her again."

"_Goujat! Triple goujat!_" cried Aristide, more incensed than ever at
this final insult.

Mrs. Ducksmith, deadly white, swayed sideways, and Aristide caught her
in his arms and dragged her to the stone bench. The fat, heavy man
looked at them for a second, laughed again, and sped through the
_porte-cochere_. Mrs. Ducksmith quickly recovered from her fainting
attack, and gently pushed the solicitous Aristide away.

"Merciful Heaven!" she murmured. "What is to become of me?"

The last person to answer the question was Aristide. For once in his
adventurous life resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he
cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of
a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out
to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a
vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and
he had fired a charge of dynamite.

He questioned her almost stupidly--for a man in the comic mask does not
readily attune himself to tragedy. She answered with the desolate
frankness of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning--or the lack of
meaning--of their inanimate lives was revealed to him. Absolute
estrangement had followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years
ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since then he saw--and the
generous blood of his heart froze as the vision came to him--that the
vulgar, half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man had nursed an
unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment against the woman. It did not
matter that the man's suspicion was vain. To Aristide the woman's blank
amazement at the preposterous charge was proof enough; to the man the
thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man had suffered the cancer
to eat away his vitals, and he had watched and watched his blameless
wife, until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly. No wonder he
could not rest at home; no wonder he was driven, Io-