He had taken her down to the supper-room, first among the first, neglecting duchesses and a princess of the blood royal for her sake. No doubt that malicious little wretch Susan Amphlett had been watching him, and had reported all his misdoings to Vera. "What does it matter?" he said to himself. "My life was growing unbearable. The gloom was closing round me like a funeral pall. Kate was my only refuge. I have never been in love with her; but she stops me from thinking." That was the secret. Mrs. Bellenden had been his Nepenthe, when the common round of pleasures had lost their power to make him forget. Mrs. Bellenden was like strong drink, like opium or hashish. She killed thought. She filled the vacant spaces in his life--the Stygian swamps where black thoughts wandered in space, like angry devils. Her exactions, her quarrels, their partings and reunions, the agitations and turmoil of her existence, had filled his life. When he banged the hall door of the bijou house in Brown Street behind him after one of their stormy farewells he knew that he would go back to her in a week. He tramped the adjacent Park across and across, along and along, in a fury, and thanked God that he had done with "that harpy"; but he knew that he would have to go back to the harpy, to be reconciled again, with oaths and kisses and tears, and to quarrel again, and to obey her orders, and go here or there as she made him. The most degrading slavery to a wicked woman was better than the great silent house and the horror that inhabited it. His wife had her consolations, nay, even her hysterical delights. She could shut herself in her white temple with the spirits of her worshipped dead. She heard voices. Death now hardly counted with her, neither Death nor Time. Saint Francis of Assisi was as near her as Robert Browning. Shakespeare was no more remote than Henry Irving. She was mad. The emptiness, the silence, the gloom, were killing him. If there had been children, all might have been different. The past would have been forgotten in those new and forward-looking lives. His sons and daughters would not have let him remember past things. And Vera would not have had time for morbid thoughts, for nursing dark memories. Her children would have made her forget.