It had been easy, an outlet to jealous anger, to declare, in the moment’s heat, she would no longer live with Gaston Arbuthnot. During dinner, though the strain was tense, there had been a certain excitement, a sense of perilous adventure, to keep her up. Now came blank reality. She must look at her position, as a stranger would, from outside. If she purposed in good earnest to seek refuge with her Devonshire kinsfolk, she had best benefit by Geoffrey’s escort on Sunday, had best, wisely and soberly, begin to pack to-night. Well, reader, ‘to pack,’ however chaotic one’s mental condition, means--to use one’s arms, see to the folding of one’s latest intricate furbelows, make sure that one’s newest bonnet shall not be crushed. Dinah got through this part of her work well enough; nay, inasmuch as packing brought her muscles into play, felt the better for it. Then came the bitter beginning of the end. She must sort her trinkets, must decide which things it was right to take with her into exile, which leave. Gaston was the most careless man living. The key of his dressing-case was in his wife’s hands, everything he owned of value in her keeping. It thus became needful, in looking over her own possessions, that she should take count of his. And in doing so their four years of married life returned, month by month, almost hour by hour before her. A legacy of two hundred pounds had come to Dinah from a well-to-do farmer uncle a few days after her wedding. ‘Too much, rather, to give to the poor, not enough, certainly, to invest,’ declared Gaston--they were at the time in Paris. ‘We will go shares, my dear child. I will take one of the good uncle’s hundreds for cigarettes and you shall have the other hundred for chiffons.’ Dinah wanted no chiffons--at Gaston’s insistence, possessing more millinery already than she knew what to do with. So her hundred pounds were mainly spent in buying pretty things for her husband. Gaston was fonder of rings and pins than are most born Englishmen. He had also an innocent way of directing Dinah’s admiration to artistic trifles in the jewellers’ windows of the Palais Royal and the Boulevards--trifles which were tolerably sure to find their way to his own dressing-table before the next morning. Ah, their good laughs when these innocent ways became too bare-faced! Ah, the golden Paris days, when each hour was sweeter than the last, when they used to jest together (little knowing) at the musty axiom which limits a pair of true lovers’ happiness to the shining of a single moon!