From the window of every English bookshop in Paris “Colossus” stared at Halo. The book had appeared a few weeks after its last pages were written, the chapters having been set up as they were finished, in order to hasten publication. Otherwise the winter sales would be missed, and “Colossus” was obviously not a work for the summer holidays. Halo suspected that the publishers, while proud to associate their name with it, were not sanguine as to pecuniary results. “Colossus” had most of the faults disquieting to the book-seller; it was much too long, nothing particular happened in it, and few people even pretended to know what it was about.

No reviews had as yet appeared when Halo saw the first copies in the rue de Rivoli windows, where they must have flowered over night. She stood hesitatingly outside the shop; there had come to be something slow and hesitating in her slightest decisions, in her movements even. She found it more and more difficult to make up her mind even about trifles — more so about trifles than about the big decisive acts. The spring of enthusiasm that used to give a momentary importance to the least event seemed to have run dry in her.

She went in and asked for a magazine. While it was being brought she glanced at the copies of “Colossus” conspicuously aligned on the New Book counter, and asked the clerk how it was going.

“We’ve sold a good many already. Anything by the author of ‘The Puritan in Spain’, you understand . . . Can I do up a copy for you?”

It was the answer she had expected. The book would benefit for a while by its predecessor’s popularity; but when that flagged — what? She paid for the magazine she had asked for, and went out.

It was a cold day of early winter, and Paris, once like home to her, seemed empty and unfriendly. She had seen no one since her arrival. Lorry, she had learned at his studio, was away. Both Mrs. Glaisher and Mrs. Blemer had failed in the end to regard “Factories” as a profitable venture, and he was negotiating for its production with a Berlin impresario. Halo had not the heart to look up Savignac — again her stealing inertia held her back; and Tolby, whom she would have been glad to see, was still in London. Paris had been a feverish desert to her before; now it was a freezing one.

She walked back through the Tuileries gardens, and across the Seine to the quiet hotel on the left bank where she was staying. She had lingered on alone in Paris for a week or ten days — ever since she had come there to see Vance off, when he had hurriedly sailed for New York — and she had a queer feeling that there was no use in trying to make any further plans, that any change, any new decision, must be imposed on her from the outside. It was as though her central spring were broken . . . yet, in a way, she knew that her future had already been settled for her.

At her hotel she asked the porter if there were any letters. She was sure he would say no; of course there would be none; and when, after a hunt through the pigeon-holes behind his desk, he handed her an envelope, she felt suddenly dizzy, and had to sit down on the nearest chair and leave the letter unopened. How strange, how incredible, to see herself addressed as “Mrs. Tarrant” in her husband’s writing! It reminded her that in spite of all that had happened she was still Mrs. Tarrant, still his wife — and it was by his own choice that it was so. That was the strangest part of it, the part she could not yet understand.

She had learned of Tarrant’s presence in Paris by seeing his name among the hotel arrivals in a daily paper. That was two days ago; and after twenty-four hours of incoherent thinking she had abruptly decided to move to another hotel, and register there under her real name — her husband’s. That night she had written to him. That night; and here, the very next morning, was his answer! One might almost have supposed that he had been waiting for some sign from her . . . She sat with her cold hands folded over the letter till her strength returned; when she could trust herself to her feet she rose and went up to her room.

The variableness of Tarrant’s moods had made her fear that he might reply harshly, or perhaps not at all. Even now she thought it likely that, if he should agree to see her, he would propose their meeting at his lawyer’s; and that would paralyze her, deprive her of all power to plead her cause. Over three months had passed since he had sent Frenside to her on that unsuccessful mission; and as she looked back on her own attitude at the time it seemed hard and ungrateful. In her self-absorption she had forgotten to send Tarrant a word of thanks, a conciliatory message; and she knew the importance he attached to such observances. For her sake he had humbled his pride, and she had seemed unaware of it. With his sensitiveness to rebuffs, and the uncertainty of his impulses, what chance was there of finding him in the same frame of mind as when he had made his advance and she had rejected it? He had a horror of reopening any discussion which he regarded as closed; might he not justly say that the message she had sent through Frenside had been final? She looked at the unopened envelope and wondered at her courage — or her folly — in writing to him.

At length she opened the letter, and read the few words within. In the extremity of her relief she felt weak again, and had to sit down and cover her face. There was no mention of lawyers; there was nothing curt or vindictive in the tone of the letter. Tarrant simply said that he would be glad to see her that afternoon at his hotel. The sheet trembled in her hand, and she found herself suddenly weeping.

The porter said that Mr. Tarrant was expecting her, and the lift carried her up to a velvet-carpeted corridor. It was the hotel where he and she had stayed whenever they were in Paris together; the narrow white-panelled corridor was exactly like the one leading to the rooms they usually had. At its end she was shown into a stiffly furnished white and gray sitting-room, and Tarrant stood up from the table at which he had been pretending to write. He was extremely pale, and catching her own reflection in the mirror behind him, she thought: “We look like two ghosts meeting . . .”

She said: “Lewis,” and held her hand out shyly. He touched it with his cold fingers, and stammered: “You’ll have tea?” as though he had meant to say something more suitable, and had forgotten what it was.

She shook her head, and he pushed an armchair forward. “Sit down.” She sat down, and for a few moments he stood irresolutely before her; then he pulled up a chair for himself and reached out for the cigarettes on the table. “You don’t mind?” She shook her head again.

Suddenly it came over her that this was perhaps the very room in which, on that unhappy night, Vance had so imprudently pleaded for her release; and the thought deepened her discouragement. But she must conquer these tremors and find herself again.

“Thank you for letting me come,” she said at length. “I ought to have thanked you before.”

He raised his eyebrows with the ironic movement habitual to him when he wanted to ward off emotional appeals. “Oh, why — ?”

“Because you sent Frenny to me with that offer. And I didn’t thank you properly.”

The blood rose under his sensitive skin. “Oh, that, really . . . I understood that you . . . that at the time you were undecided about your own future. . .”

“Yes; I was. But I want to tell you that I was very grateful, though I may not have seemed so; and that now — now I accept.”

Tarrant was silent. He had regained control of his features, but Halo could measure the intensity of the effort, and the inward perturbation it denoted. After all, he and she had the same emotional reactions, though his range was so much more limited; in moments of stress she could read his mind and his heart as she had never been able to read Vance’s. The thought cast back a derisive light on her youthful illusions.

After the first months of burning intimacy with Vance, and the harrowing extremes of their subsequent life, Tarrant had become a mere shadow to her, and she had not foreseen that his presence would rouse such searching memories. But she was one of the women on whom successive experiences stamp themselves without effacing each other; and suddenly, in all her veins and nerves, she felt that this cold embarrassed man, having once been a part of her life, could never quite cease to be so. No wonder she had never been able to adapt herself to the amorous code of Lorry’s group! She sat waiting, her heart weighed down with memories, while Tarrant considered her last words.

“You accept —?” he repeated at length.

“I— yes. The divorce, I mean . . . I understand that you . . .”

“You’ve decided that you want a divorce?” She nodded.

He sat with bent head, his unlit cigarette between his fingers. “You’re quite certain . . . now . . . that this is really what you wish?”

“I— oh, yes, yes,” she stammered.

Tarrant continued in contemplation of her words, and she began to fear that, after all, he might have let her come only for the bitter pleasure of refusing what she asked. She had nearly cried out, appealed to him to shorten her suspense; but she controlled herself and waited. He got up, and stood before her.

“I ask the question because — if Frenside gave me a correct account of your talk — you took the opposite view at that time: you didn’t want to take proceedings because you thought that if you did so Weston might feel obliged to marry you.” He brought out the words with difficulty; she felt sorry for the effort it was costing him to get through this scene, which she might have spared him if she had accepted Frenside’s intervention. “Are you positively sure now?” he insisted.

“Yes.”

“You wish to divorce me in order to marry your lover?”

“Lewis —!”

He smiled faintly. “You object to the word?”

“No; but it seems so useless to go into all this again.”

He took no notice, but pursued, in the same level voice: “You and Weston have come together again, and wish to marry? Is that it?”

She lowered her eyes, and paused a moment before answering. “I am not sure — that we shall ever marry. I want my freedom.”

“Freedom? Freedom to live without a name, or any one to look after you? What sort of a life do you propose to lead if you don’t marry him? Have you thought of that?”

She hesitated again. She might have resented his questioning; but his tone, though cold, was not unkind. And she knew him so well that she could detect the latent sympathy behind those measured phrases.

“I haven’t thought of the future yet. I only know it seems best that I should take back my own name.”

“If you’re not to take his — is that what you mean?”

“I’m not sure . . . about anything. But I want to be free.”

He went and leaned against the mantelshelf, looking down on her with dubious eyes. “The situation, then, is much the same as when you saw Frenside; it’s only your own attitude that has changed?”

“Well . . . yes . . . I suppose so. . .”

There was a silence which she measured by the nervous knocking of her heart. At that moment her knowledge of her husband seemed of no avail. She could not guess what his secret motive was; but she felt dimly that something deep within him had been renewed and transformed, and that it was an unknown Tarrant who confronted her. He twisted the cigarette incessantly between his fingers. “I heard you’d been unhappy — ” he began abruptly.

She flushed and lifted her head. “No!”

He smiled again. “You wouldn’t admit it, I suppose. At any rate, you’re alone — at present. Don’t you think that — in the circumstances — my name is at least a sort of protection?”

The question surprised her so much that she could find no words to reply; and he hurried on, as if anxious to take advantage of her silence: “I’ve no doubt my attitude, all along, has been misrepresented to you. Perhaps it was partly my own fault. I’m not good at explaining — especially things that touch me closely. But for a long time now I’ve felt that some day you might be glad to have kept my name . . . It was my chief reason for not agreeing to a divorce. . .” He spoke in the low indifferent tone which always concealed his moments of deepest perturbation. “You never thought of that, I suppose?&rdq............