I forget now absolutely what I may have expected to happen next. I cannot remember my return to my father's house that day. But I know that what did happen was the most unanticipated and incredible experience of my life. It was as if the whole world of mankind were suddenly to turn upside down and people go about calmly in positions of complete . I had a note from Mary on the morning after this discovery that indeed dealt with that but was otherwise not very different from endless notes I had received before our crisis. It was destroyed, so that I do not know its exact text now, but it did not add anything material to the situation, or give me the faintest shadow to intimate what crept close upon us both. She repeated her strangely refusal to come away and live with me. She seemed indignant that we had been discovered—as though Justin had indulged in an excess of existence by discovering us. I completed and despatched to her a long letter I had already been writing overnight in which I made clear the hopeless impossibility of her attitude, all my life and strength to her, tried to make some picture of the happiness that was possible for us together, as definitely as I could when and where we might meet and whither we might go. It must have made an extraordinary of protest, and practicality. It never reached her; it was by Justin.  
I have gathered since that after I left Martens he sent telegrams to Guy and Philip and her cousin Lord Tarvrille. He was I think amazed beyond measure at this revelation of the possibilities of his cold and distant wife, with a vast passion of awaking in him, and absolutely of forming any plan to meet the demands of his extraordinary situation. Guy and Philip got to him that night, Tarvrille came down next morning, and Martens became a debate. Justin did not so much express views and intentions as have them extracted from him; it was manifest he was prepared for the amplest forgiveness of his wife if only I could be from their world. Confronted with her brothers, the two men in the world who could be to her, Mary's dignity suffered; she persisted she meant to go on seeing me, but she was reduced to tears.
 
Into some such state of affairs I came that morning on the heels of my letter, demanding Lady Mary of a scared evasive butler.
 
Maxton and Tarvrille appeared: "Hullo, Stratton!" said Tarvrille, with a fine flavor of an agreeable chance meeting. Philip had doubts about his greeting me, and then extended his reluctant hand with a nervous grin to excuse the delay.
 
"I want to see Lady Mary," said I, stiffly.
 
"She's not up yet," said Tarvrille, with a hand on my shoulder. "Come and have a talk in the garden."
 
We went out with Tarvrille expanding the topic of the seasons. "It's a damned good month, November, say what you like about it." Philip walked grimly silent on my other hand.
 
"And it's a damned awkward situation you've got us into, Stratton," said Tarvrille, "say what you like about it."
 
"It isn't as though old Justin was any sort of beast," he reflected, "or anything like that, you know. He's a most astonishing decent chap, clean as they make them."
 
"This isn't a beastly intrigue," I said.
 
"It never is," said Tarvrille .
 
"We've loved each other a long time. It's just out here."
 
"No doubt of that," said Tarvrille. "It's been like a to all Surrey."
 
"It's one of those cases where things have to be readjusted. The best thing to do is for Mary and me to go abroad——"
 
"Yes, but does Mary think so?"
 
"Look here!"............