Discovery followed hard upon that meeting. I had come over to Martens with some book as a ; the man had told me that Lady Mary awaited me in her blue , and I went unannounced through the long gallery to find her. The door stood a little ajar, I opened it softly so that she did not hear me, and saw her seated at her writing-desk with her back to me, and her cheek and just touched by the sunlight from the open terrace window. She was writing a note. I put my hand about her shoulder, and to kiss her as she turned. Then as she came round to me she started, was for a moment , then thrust me from her and rose very slowly to her feet.  
I turned to the window and became as rigid, facing Justin. He was on the terrace, staring at us, with a face that looked stupid and inexpressive and—very white. The sky behind him, appropriately enough, was full of the inky of a thunderstorm. So we remained for a second perhaps, a vivant. We two seemed to hang helplessly upon Justin, and he was the first of us to move.
 
He made a queer, incomplete gesture with one hand, as if he wanted to the top button of his waistcoat and then thought better of it. He came very slowly into the room. When he his voice had neither rage nor denunciation in it. It was simply . "I felt this was going on," he said. And then to his wife with the note of one who remarks dispassionately on a situation. "Yet somehow it seemed wrong and to think such a thing of you."
 
His face took on something of the look of a child who struggles with a difficult task. "Do you mind," he said to me, "will you go?"
 
I took a moment for my reply. "No," I said. "Since you know at last—— There are things to be said."
 
"No," said Mary, suddenly. "Go! Let me talk to him."
 
"No," I said, "my place is here beside you."
 
He seemed not to hear me. His eyes were on Mary. He seemed to think he had dismissed me, and that I was no longer there. His mind was not concerned about me, but about her. He spoke as though what he said had been in his mind, and no doubt it had been in his mind, for many days. "I didn't deserve this," he said to her. "I've tried to make your life as you wanted your life. It's astonishing to find—I haven't. You gave no sign. I suppose I ought to have felt all this happening, but it comes upon me surprisingly. I don't know what I'm to do." He became aware of me again. "And you!" he said. "What am I to do? To think that you—while I have been treating her like some sacred thing...."
 
 
The color was creeping back into his face. Indignation had come into his voice, the first yellow lights of rising showed in his eyes.
 
"Stephen," I heard Mary say, "will you leave me to talk to my husband?"
 
"There is only one thing to do," I said. "What is the need of talking? We two are lovers, Justin." I spoke to both of them. "We two must go out into the world, go out now together. This marriage of yours—it's no marriage, no real marriage...."
 
I think I said that. I seem to remember saying that; perhaps with other phrases that I have forgotten. But my memory of what we said and did, which is so photographically clear of these earlier passages that I believe I can answer for every gesture and nearly every word that I have set down, becomes suddenly . The high tension of our first was giving place to a flood of emotional impulse. We all became eager to talk, to impose and upon our situation. We all three became divided between our partial attention to one another and our urgent necessity to keep hold of our points of view. That I think is the common tragedy of almost all human conflicts, that rapid from the first cool of an issue to heat, confusion, and . I do not know if indeed we raised our voices, but my memory has an effect of raised voices, and when at last I went out of the house it seemed to me that the men-servants in the hall were as hushed as beasts before a thunderstorm, and all of them quite aware of the tremendous that had come to Martens. And moreover, as I recalled afterwards with , I went past them and out into the driving rain unprotected, and not one of them stirred a serviceable hand....
 
What was it we said? I have a vivid sense of declaring not once only but several times that Mary and I were husband and w............