As he said this to himself, the debt of everything that he owed came very practically to his mind. All the peace he had known; agreeable and courteous companionship whenever he had sought it; the grace and comfort of a well-ordered household; and, if anything further, he had for a long time been too careless to foster it, unheedful of its value. If she were only a habit, she was a fixed one, more steadfast than any other hitherto formed. What should he say to her? Since he could not trick her to regard the situation with anything but disgust and anger, he would tell her the truth and plead weakness without love and beg her forgiveness. His nature twinged at this, a burning flush made him hot all over. A distaste of the cowardice in such confessions nauseated him. If she forgave him, if he made a clean breast of it in loyalty to her and disloyalty to the other, things would never be the same again. Between them there would always be his weakness and her nobility. Before humiliations such as these some natures do not shrink. Evremond shivered at it with all his sensibility and pride. “Not,” he acknowledged, “that I am too beastly proud to own up, but that I dread the result to us both. _Que faire?_” At nine o’clock, his nerves on the rack, his control gone, he telephoned to the little hotel, 75 Rue Docteur Blanche. “Mrs. Evremond has not been at her mother’s for several days--who wished to know? Was there anything wrong?” “Nothing.” He put up the receiver--a new thought seized him horribly. Why had he supposed this the one and only solution--the quiet solution to his wife’s problem, the sequence to her discovery? What if she had suddenly, surprisingly, taken it to heart, and it had unnerved her? He had not thought of her or her feelings. She loved him--she had loved him, he knew it well--dearly. “What if she had----” he exclaimed, aloud, white with emotion. Then: “Nonsense,” he exclaimed, “she is not hysterical--she is control itself.” What was she? Really, what did he know of her accurately; when had he seen her obliged to face any crisis in her quiet life? He rang violently, and when the man came in, asked: “When did madame go out, did you tell me? Tell me again.” “At five. Charles drove madame a little way on the Champs Elysées, and was then dismissed.” She had been gone then five hours. There was no house of an intimate friend to which she could have gone for advice or even familiar confidence. She had no _intimes_, no enthusiasms; she lived, and he knew it, for him and her home absolutely. She had built a simple, healthful existence around him. In this, his first solitude, his first long soliloquy, the state of Evremond’s mind altered as did his countenance. He grew stilled, almost appalled, at what might come to his knowledge now, at any moment, and facts magnified by his vivid imagination became ghosts to him--every one.