had driven to the station
on her way to Cornwall. "You will understand, I think, Gregory," said
Mrs. Forrester, "that it is hardly possible for her to face in London,
as yet, the situation that you have made for her."

Gregory, to this, replied, shortly, that he would come to her at once,
reserving his comments on the imputed blame.

He had passed an almost sleepless night, lying in his little
dressing-room bed where, by a tacit agreement, never explicitly
recognized, he had slept, now, for so many nights. Cold fears, shaped at
last in definite forms, stood round him and bade him see the truth. His
wife did not love him. From the beginning he had been as nothing to her
compared with her guardian. The pale, hard light of her eyes as she had
said to him that afternoon, "Speak!" seemed to light the darkness with
bitter revelations. He knew that he was what would be called,
sentimentally, a broken-hearted man; but it seemed that the process of
breaking had been gradual; so that now, when his heart lay in pieces,
his main feeling was not of sharp pain but of dull fatigue, not of
tragic night, but of a grey commonplace from which all sunlight had
slowly ebbed away.

He found Mrs. Forrester in her morning-room among loudly singing
canaries and pots of jonquils; and as he shook hands with her he saw
that this old friend, so old and so accustomed that she was like a part
of his life, was embarrassed. The wrinkles on her withered, but oddly
juvenile, face seemed to have shifted to a pattern of perplexity and
pained resolution. He was not embarrassed, though he was beaten and done
in a way Mrs. Forrester could not guess at; yet he felt an awkwardness.

They had known each other for a life-time, he and Mrs. Forrester, but
they were not intimate; and how intimate they would have to become if
they were to discuss with anything like frankness the causes and
consequences of Madame von Marwitz's conduct! A gloomy indifference
settled on Gregory as he realized that her dear friend's conduct was the
one factor in the causes and consequences that Mrs. Forrester would not
be able to appraise at its true significance.

She shook his hand, and seating herself at a little table and slightly
tapping it with her fingers, "Now, my dear Gregory," she said, "will
you, please, tell me why you have acted like this?"

"Isn't my case prejudged?" Gregory asked, reconstructing the scene that
must have taken place last night when Madame von Marwitz