She kept herself calm for a minute longer. “I’m sorry,” she said--“I’m sorry for his poor little wife. I’m sorry for Ellida, who wants him cured, but it’s their fault for having to do with such a soft, meddlesome creature as you.” And then suddenly she burst out into a full torrent: “Jealous!” she said. “Yes, I’m jealous. Is that news to you? It isn’t to me. That’s the secret of the whole thing, if you come to think of it. Now that it’s all over between us there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know it. All my life you’ve tortured me. When I was a tiny child it was the same. I wanted you altogether, body and soul, and you had always someone like that, that you took an interest in; that you were always trying to get _me_ to take an interest in. Just you think the matter out. It’ll make you understand a good many things.” She broke off, and then she began again: “Jealous? Yes, if it’s jealousy to want a woman’s right--the whole of a man altogether.” She closed her eyes and stood for a moment shuddering. “Good-bye,” she said; and with an extreme stiffness she went down the short path. As she turned to go through the gate she called back: “You’d better try Morley Bishop.” Grimshaw rose to his feet as if to follow her, but an extreme weariness had overcome him. He picked up the pieces of her parasol, and with a slow and halting gait went along the dusty road towards the village inn. A little later he took from the nearest station the train up to London, but the intolerable solitude of the slow journey, the thought of Pauline’s despair, the whole weight of depression, of circumstance, made him, on arriving at London Bridge, get out and cross the platform to the down-train time-tables. He was going to return to Brighton. Ellida was sitting in the hotel room about eleven, reading a novel that concerned itself with the Court life of a country called “Nolhynia.” She looked up at Robert Grimshaw, and said: “Well, what have you two been up to?” “Hasn’t Katya told you?” Ellida, luxuriating at last in the sole possession of her little Kitty, who by now prattled distractingly; luxuriating, too, in the possession of many solid hours of a night of peace, stolen unexpectedly and unavoidably from the duties of a London career, was really and paganly sprawling in a very deep chair. “No,” she said. “Katya hasn’t told me anything. Where is Katya? I thought you’d decided to go off together at last, and leave poor little Pauline to do the best she could;” and she held out, without moving more than her hand, a pink telegram form which bore the words: “Don’t worry about me. Am quite all right. See that Kitty’s milk is properly metchnikoffed.” “It was sent from Victoria,” she said, “so of _course_ I thought you’d been and gone and done it. I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry, but I think I was mostly glad.” She looked up at his anxious face curiously. “Haven’t you gone and done it?” she said. “You don’t mean to say you’ve split again?”