There was no limit to her treachery. The husband saw himself ridiculed, travestied--in the lover’s letters. His ignorance, his vulgarity, were put forward as reasons why his wife should betray him. Such a man--to put the insolent plea in plain words--was unworthy of pity; he was beyond the pale of social law--the code of gentlemanly honour did not recognise his existence. He was a cipher, like those wretched husbands in the old feudal days, from whom the lord of the soil might take everything, bride, honour, the right of property in a newly wedded wife, as in the land they tilled and the harvest they reaped. Mr. Piper made the letters up into a couple of neat bundles, and put them in his pocket. There was a letter for every day in the week. Captain Standish’s idleness had run into letter-writing. Then, pale to the lips, but cold and firm, Mr. Piper replaced the pigeon-holes, shut the escritoire, and went downstairs to see if his wife had yet come home. ‘Home,’ he repeated. ‘No, she shall never call my house by that name again.’ And then he remembered his first wife, with her humble dog-like fidelity, her narrow spirit, troubled about many things, but always true to him, reverencing him as the king of men, the epitome of wisdom. Poor Moggie, who had been pretty and buxom once, and who had kept his house so well in those happy days when he was beginning to grow rich. Ah, how different from this beautiful viper, this living lie, a creature that could smile at him and caress him while she kept those letters in her desk! ‘She shall never cross my threshold again,’ he said to himself. ‘There shall be no slander--no legal separation. I’ll give her a thousand a year, and she may go to the devil her own way.’ The clock struck five as he went downstairs. A cold white mist veiled the park, and crept into the house. The fire glowed redly on the hearth in the hall, before which the footman sat in a Glastonbury chair, reading the newspaper. ‘Mrs. Piper not returned yet?’ asked the master of the house. ‘No, sir.’ The man vacated the seat in his master’s favour, and went off to his tea and toast in the servants’ hall--such buttered toast as could never have been in the first Mrs. Piper’s time, when there were close calculations weekly as to the pounds of butter that had been consumed--‘made away with’ the late Mrs. Piper called it when she was angry--during the last seven days. Mr. Piper sat before the fire, looking straight into the glowing pile of coal and wood, and thinking of the letters he had just read. His mind was so full of these that the fact of his wife’s prolonged absence troubled him not at all. It did not even strike him as strange that she should be so long away. That other wonder, the strangeness of her treachery, the wonder that any woman could so deceive, absorbed every thought. He sat before the fire, meditating this great iniquity, and with only a dreamy sense that the day had been long, and that evening was drawing in.