He remained stooping and staring up at her, realising the implication of her words only very slowly.

Then it grew clear to him.

As she saw understanding dawning in his face, she uttered a cry of consternation. She came forward and sat down upon the little bedroom chair. She turned to him and began a sentence. "I," she said, and stopped, with an impatient gesture of her hands. "_Oh_!"

He straightened himself and stood regarding her. The basket of roses lay overturned between them.

"You thought these came from someone else?" he said, trying to grasp this inversion of the universe.

She turned her eyes, "I did not know," she panted. "A trap.... Was it likely--they came from you?"

"You thought they came from someone else," he said.

"Yes," she said, "I did."

"Who?"

"Mr. Baynes."

"That boy!"

"Yes--that boy."

"Well!"

Lewisham looked about him--a man in the presence of the inconceivable.

"You mean to say you have been carrying on with that youngster behind my back?" he asked.

She opened her lips to speak and had no words to say.

His pallor increased until every tinge of colour had left his face. He laughed and then set his teeth. Husband and wife looked at one another.

"I never dreamt," he said in even tones.

He sat down on the bed, thrusting his feet among the scattered roses with a sort of grim satisfaction. "I never dreamt," he repeated, and the flimsy basket kicked by his swinging foot hopped indignantly through the folding doors into the living room and left a trail of blood-red petals.

They sat for perhaps two minutes, and when he spoke again his voice was hoarse. He reverted to a former formula. "Look here," he said, and cleared his throat. "I don't know whether you think I'm going to stand this, but I'm not."

He looked at her. She sat staring in front of her, making no attempt to cope with disaster.

"When I say I'm not going to stand it," explained Lewisham, "I don't mean having a row or anything of that sort. One can quarrel and be disappointed over--other things--and still go on. But this is a different thing altogether.

"Of all dreams and illusions!... Think what I have lost in this accursed marriage. And _now_ ... You don't understand--you won't understand."

"Nor you," said Ethel, weeping but neither looking at him nor moving her hands from her lap where they lay helplessly. "_You_ don't understand."

"I'm beginning to."

He sat in silence gathering force. "In one year," he said, "all my hopes, all my ambitions have gone. I know I have been cross and irritable--I know that. I've been pulled two ways. But ... I bought you these roses."

She looked at the roses, and then at his white face, made an imperceptible movement towards him, and became impassive again.

"I do think one thing. I have found out you are shallow, you don't think, you can't feel things that I think and feel. I have been getting over that. But I did think you were loyal--"

"I _am_ loyal," she cried.

"And you think--Bah!--you poke my roses under the table!"

Another portentous silence. Ethel stirred and he turned his eyes to watch what she was about to do. She produced her handkerchief and began to wipe her dry eyes rapidly, first one and then the other. Then she began sobbing. "I'm ... as loyal as you ... anyhow," she said.

For a moment Lewisham was aghast. Then he perceived he must ignore that argument.

"I would have stood it--I would have stood anything if you had been loyal--if I could have been sure of you. I am a fool, I know, but I would have stood the interruption of my work, the loss of any hope of a Career, if I had been sure you were loyal. I ... I cared for you a great deal."

He stopped. He had suddenly perceived the pathetic. He took refuge in anger.

"And you have deceived me! How long, how much, I don't care. You have deceived me. And I tell you"--he began to gesticulate--"I'm not so much your slave and fool as to stand that! No woman shall make me _that_ sort of fool, whatever else--So far as I am concerned, this ends things. This ends things. We are married--but I don't care if we were married five hundred times. I won't stop with a woman who takes flowers from another man--"

"I _didn't_," said Ethel.

Lewisham gave way to a transport of anger. He caught up a handful of roses and extended them, trembling. "What's _this_?" he asked. His finger bled from a thorn, as once it had bled from a blackthorn spray.

"I _didn't_ take them," said Ethel. "I couldn't help it if they were sent."

"Ugh!" said Lewisham. "But what is the good of argument and denial? You took them in, you had them. You may have been cunning, but you have given yourself away. And our life and all this"--he waved an inclusive hand at Madam Gadow's furniture--"is at an end."

He looked at her and repeated with bitter satisfaction, "At an end."

She glanced at his face, and his expression was remorseless. "I will not go on living with you," he said, lest there should be any mistake. "Our life is at an end."

Her eyes went from his face to the scattered roses. She remained staring at these. She was no longer weeping, and her face, save about the eyes, was white.

He presented it in another form. "I shall go away."

"We never ought to have married," he reflected. "But ... I never expected _this_!"

"I didn't know," she cried out, lifting up her voice. "I _didn't_ know. How could _I_ help! _Oh_!"

She stopped and stared at him with hands clenched, her eyes haggard with despair.

Lewisham remained impenetrably malignant.

"I don't _want_ to know," he said, answering her dumb appeal. "That settles everything. _That_!" He indicated the scattered flowers. "What does it matter to me what has happened or hasn't happened? Anyhow--oh! I don't mind. I'm glad. See? It settles things.

"The sooner we part the better. I shan't stop with you another night. I shall take my box and my portmanteau into that room and pack. I shall stop in there to-night, sleep in a chair or _think_. And to-morrow I shall settle up with Madam Gadow and go. You can go back ... to your cheating."

He stopped for some seconds. She was deadly still. "You wanted to, and now you may. You wanted to, before I got work. You remember? You know your place is still open at Lagune's. I don't care. I tell you I don't care _that_. Not that! You may go your own way--and I shall go mine. See? And all this rot--this sham of living together when neither cares for the other--I don't care for you _now_, you know, so you needn't think it--will be over and done with. As for marriage--I don't care _that_ for marriage--it can't make a sham and a blunder anything but a sham.

"It's a sham, and shams have to end, and that's the end of the matter."

He stood up resolutely. He kicked the scattered roses out of his way and dived beneath the bed for his portmanteau. Ethel neither spoke nor moved, but remained watching his movements. For a time the portmanteau refused to emerge, and he marred his stern resolution by a half audible "Come here--damn you!" He swung it into the living room and returned for his box. He proposed to pack in that room.

When he had taken all his personal possessions out of the bedroom, he closed the folding-doors with an air of finality. He knew from the sounds that followed that she flung herself upon the bed, and that filled him with grim satisfaction.

He stood listening for a space, then set about packing methodically. The first rage of discovery had abated; he knew quite clearly that he was inflicting grievous punishment, and that gratified him. There was also indeed a curious pleasure in the determination of a long and painful period of vague misunderstanding by this unexpected crisis. He was acutely conscious of the silence on the other side of the folding-doors, he kept up a succession of deliberate little noises, beat books together and brushed clothes, to intimate the resolute prosecution of his preparations.

That was about nine o'clock. At eleven he was still busy....

Darkness came suddenly upon him. It was Madam Gadow's economical habit to turn off all her gas at that hour unless she chanced to be entertaining friends.

He felt in his pocket for matches and he had none. He whispered curses. Against such emergencies he had bought a brass lamp and in the bedroom there were candles. Ethel had a candle alight, he could see the bright yellow line that appeared between the folding doors. He felt his way p............