It was a diabolical lottery altogether, and the soul of the man groaned within him. It was even worse than he had anticipated in the first hot glamour of love. He freely confessed this, but he had sworn to himself, in his foolish raptures, that he would face hell for the girl, and he was not the man to eat his words. They walked to Brydon’s. Gwen took a great delight in going in and out among the streets, and a shamefaced pleasure in listening to her husband’s stories of every twist and turning in them. “There is no one like him for a companion!” she often confessed to herself angrily, “no one I know that comes near him. What made me marry him, what? Even this part of him I can’t accept and enjoy without disgust and self-loathing.” At last they got to the little street that Brydon lived in, and climbed to the fourth flat of a tall house. When Brydon saw Strange he reddened with delight, but when he was presented to Gwen, he paled suddenly and his eyes fell. “You could have knocked me down with a feather!” he explained afterwards, to his chosen comrade. It was a superb compliment to her, and her husband laughed as he saw it. And then a queer wonder took hold of him as to the sort of ending this good humoured half-impersonal pride he took in her conquests would have, then this evolved another wonder which dealt with the birth of a strong woman’s passion. Strange pulled himself up and thrust this out of his mind with a rough shove. “On the whole, what’s the result so far, Charlie?” he asked, when that young man had established his wife in a big cane chair, softening the light from one side and strengthening it from another in a lingering, absorbed way, as with half-closed eyes he furtively drank in the fulness of her beauty. The question stripped the glamour from him at a rush, he flopped limply down on to a seat. “If only you hadn’t asked that question for three more months, but now, now, it is cruel! Just imagine a fellow, free all his life to ride his own nag, a sorry jade it might be, but anyway fit enough for him, and his own; just fancy him strapped on to a small donkey belonging to another fellow, that it would be more than his life was worth to prod into a gallop, and to have to peg along on this beast week in, week out, along the same old road! Oh Lord, the grind, it’s awful, awful, digging one’s heels into that confounded ass—Oh!—” He jumped up with a guilty start. “Lady Strange, I beg your pardon, I forget what ladies are like, and Strange is such a comfortable fellow to growl to, bad language slips out before one can catch it, at the very sight of him.” “Don’t apologize to me, especially if my husband is the cause of your offence,” said Gwen kindly. She had a fancy to be kind to this boy, if she had confessed it to herself, it was with a distinct view of getting to know a side of her husband, that Brydon knew all about and she nothing. She was making a study of him in spite of herself, and liked to collect evidence.