“I shall double it next year, and double that again the next, and so on. I work from morning till night to get on, that you may have—what you live for,” he said bitterly. “Ah, I shall be sixty before that happy day comes, and want nothing but scandal and a bath chair. I know the Bar and its moaning,” she added, with acid wit. “You dream, you imagine what you would like to come true, but you are deceiving me and yourself. It will be like the story of Sir Robert Bingham’s property once again. We shall be beggars all our days. I tell you, Geoffrey, that you had no right to marry me.” Then at length he lost his temper. This was not the first of these scenes—they had grown frequent of late, and this bitter water was constantly dropping. “Right?” he said, “and may I ask what right you had to marry me when you don’t even pretend you ever cared one straw for me, but just accepted me as you would have accepted any other man who was a tolerably good match? I grant that I first thought of proposing to you because my uncle wished it, but if I did not love you I meant to be a good husband to you, and I should have loved you if you would let me. But you are cold and selfish; you looked upon a husband merely as a stepping-stone to luxury; you have never loved anybody except yourself. If I had died last night I believe that you would have cared more about having to go into mourning than for the fact of my disappearance from your life. You showed no more feeling for me when you came in than you would have if I had been a stranger—not so much as some women might have for a stranger. I wonder sometimes if you have any feeling left in you at all. I should think that you treat me as you do because you do not care for me and do care for some other person did I not know you to be utterly incapable of caring for anybody. Do you want to make me hate you, Honoria?” Geoffrey’s low concentrated voice and earnest manner told his wife, who was watching him with something like a smile upon her clear-cut lips, how deeply he was moved. He had lost his self-control, and exposed his heart to her—a thing he rarely did, and that in itself was a triumph which she did not wish to pursue at the moment. Geoffrey was not a man to push too far. “If you have quite finished, Geoffrey, there is something I should like to say——” “Oh, curse it all!” he broke in. “Yes?” she said calmly and interrogatively, and made a pause, but as he did not specially apply his remark to anybody or anything, she continued: “If these flowers of rhetoric are over, what I have to say is this: I do not intend to stay in this horrid place any longer. I am going to-morrow to my brother Garsington. They asked us both, you may remember, but for reasons best known to yourself, you would not go.” “You know my reasons very well, Honoria.” “I beg your pardon. I have not the slightest idea what they were,” said Lady Honoria with conviction. “May I hear them?”