He believed it was all the doing of that blessed old Aunt of hers. If she hadn't had Athabasca Villa to run away to,--why, she wouldn't have run away at all! She would have snapped and grizzled at him for a time, and then made it up. And then they would have had an outing, to Folkestone or Littlehampton, and it would all have been jolly. Instead of which, here they were, living apart and writing each other letters at intervals--for they kept to correspondence--and, so far as he could see, letters only made matters worse. He knew that the moment he took up his pen to write a regular sit-down letter he put his foot in it. He had always done that from a boy. Probably, throughout all the long summer that had passed since his quarrel with his wife, he had not once missed saying, as a morning resolution to begin the day with, that he wouldn't stand this any longer. He would go straight away, after breakfast, to Athabasca Villa, and beard Aunt Priscilla in her den, his mind seeming satisfied with the resolution in this form. But every day he put it off, his real underlying objection to going being that he would have to confess to having made himself such an unmitigated and unconscionable Juggins. His Jugginshood clung to him like that Siccatif to his fingers. It was too late to mitigate himself now. And six months of discomfort had contrived to slip away, of which every day was to be the last. And here he was still! If he had understood self-examination--people don't, mostly--he might have detected in himself a corner of thought of a Juggins-mitigating character. However angry he felt with his wife, he could not, would not, admit the possibility that she believed real ill of him. His loyalty to her went further than Geraint's to Enid, for he imputed to her acquittal of himself, from sheer ignorance of the sort of thing anybody else's wife might impute to anybody else's husband. Because, you see, he had at heart such a very exalted view of her character. Perhaps she would not have thanked him for fixing such a standard for her to act up to. He sat on--on--in the falling darkness; the little cheerfulness of his friends' visit had quite vanished. The lumber he had wallowed in had grimed his heart as well as his garments. He would have liked Tea--a great stand-by when pain and anguish wring the brow. But when you are too proud to admit that your brow is being wrung, and you know it is no use ringing the bell, because Mrs. Gapp, or her equivalent, is at the William the Fourth, why, then you probably collapse and submit to Fate, as Mr. Reginald Aiken did. It didn't much matter now if he had no Tea. No ministering Angel was there to make it.