Gradually a sense of his surroundings began to return to him. He became conscious that it was a street-lamp at which he was looking; that there was a dark little street before him; that there was a dim room behind him; and then from that room a low sound came to him--faint, exhausted, long-drawn sobs, as of a woman who has wept herself into quiet. He began to listen for them and count them involuntarily. Then they began to hurt him; each one seemed to stick something into his heart. At last he walked across almost mechanically, and laid his hand tentatively on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Clemence!” he said huskily. “It’s all right, dear. After all, you know, you are my wife all right!” He was conscious of a vague idea that it was the supposition he had allowed that had cut her so cruelly. There was another moment’s pause, and then Clemence slowly lifted her head and looked at him for the first time. Her face was white and exhausted-looking with her tears, and her eyes, luminous and inexpressibly mournful, seemed to look through the pale, good-looking young features above her into the poor cramped soul they hid. “I?” she said. “What does it matter about me, Julian? It’s you! Oh, my dear, my dear, it’s you!” “It--it’s awkward!” returned Julian gloomily; his consciousness of the prospect before him seemed to quicken and writhe at what he supposed to be her realisation of it. “It’s loss of everything practically, of course. One will be cut right and left, and where money is to come from----” He was interrupted by a low cry. Clemence had drawn a little back as though to see him better, and was looking up at him with her delicate eyebrows drawn together in intense, painful perplexity and wonder. “Oh, Julian!” she said, and her low voice had for the first time a ring of reproach in it. “Oh, Julian, it isn’t that, dear! It isn’t that! What does that matter?” “What does it matter?” echoed Julian with an angry laugh. Her words, in the total want of comprehension, the total incapacity for sympathy with his position, to which they witnessed, seemed to him to throw into sudden, glaring relief the class distinction which lay between them; and the sense of it came upon him, jarring and overwhelming, like an earnest of all he had done for himself. “It matters a good deal, let me tell you, Clemence. It matters--as you can’t understand, you know! It matters just everything!” “But--compared!” she said in a low, quick tone, a bright, pained light in her eyes. “I know--I know, of course, that there is a great deal I can’t understand. But--compared!” “Compared with what, in Heaven’s name?” said Julian angrily.