er her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever.
A ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could
Fritz suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at
once as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that
sort of man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle
brute. He blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now
with a sort of sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them
fade away in the brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt
another manner, more in accord with her condition of tense nervousness.

"When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to
do it," she said sharply. "You're forgetting what's due to me--to any
woman."

"Don't fuss at this time of night."

"I want to go to bed, but I'm not going till I know the house is
properly shut up. Please go at once and see."

"I never knew you were such a coward," he rejoined without stirring.
"Who was at the opera?"

"I won't talk to you till you do what I ask."

"That's a staggerin' blow."

She sprang up with an exclamation of anger. Her nerves were on edge and
she felt inclined to scream out.

"I never thought you could be so--such a cad to a woman, Fritz," she
said.

She moved towards the door. As she did so she heard a cab in the square
outside, a rattle of wheels, then silence. It had stopped. Her heart
seemed to stand still too. She knew now that she was a coward, though
not in the way Fritz meant. She was a coward with regard to him.
Her jealousy had prompted her to do a mad thing. In doing it she had
actually meant to produce a violent scene. It had seemed to her that
such a scene would relieve the tension of her nerves, of her heart,
would clear the air. But now that the scene seemed imminent--if Fritz
had forgotten, and she was certain he had forgotten, to lock the
door--she felt heart and nerves were failing her. She felt that she
had risked too much, far too much. With almost incredible swiftness she
remembered her imprudence in speaking to Carey at Arkell House and how
it had only served to put a weapon into her husband's hand, a weapon he
had not scrupled to use in his selfish way to further his own pleasure
and her distress. That stupid failure had not sufficiently warned her,
and now she was on the edge of some greater disaster. She was positive
that Leo Ulford was in the cab which had just stopped, and