I stood in the window looking out at scudding clouds, which raced by in thin streamers of grey. Eva might have been drifting past, looking in on us, listening for what we might say. My eyes at once blinded by tears, I stammered: “Don’t! Don’t! I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Why did you come here?” And I said to myself “I feel that there’s a dreadful mistake, somewhere.” For he was insisting: “You knew, didn’t you, that Spencer Mapes followed her to Hollywood? You knew it all along, didn’t you?” He gave a short laugh. “It’s so plain. And I shouldn’t have been surprised.” I came back from the window. “I knew that he was out there, and that it hadn’t necessarily to do with Eva. Why shouldn’t he go out there? What are you driving at?” But if in fact he was driving at anything beyond his hurt bewilderment he did not at once acknowledge it. I thought that actually he had come to tell me about their rupture, and that face to face with me he slid against his will into his old-time habit of thinking aloud on Eva’s tremendous spell upon him. There was nothing to do but let him talk. Whatever question might be in his mind about Spencer Mapes must wait. “Perhaps I’d better take it up with the statement that until the night of her return I didn’t know that she was thinking of leaving me. She had said nothing of the sort in her letters. I was so bucked at her getting back. I had been lonelier than I had realized. She didn’t look well; said she’d caught cold on the train, and the change from the warm climate of the Coast was already making it worse. It was horrible weather--one of those persistent rains when April is cold. The trees were in bud, but they were lashing, I remember, beating against the windowpanes. Strange--how one remembers things like that. I don’t believe I can ever again bear to hear branches scraping against windowpanes. Her cheeks were bright red; and yet she looked exhausted. I suggested telephoning for a doctor, but she said ‘Don’t be absurd. I want to talk to you.’ She came and patted my cheek. You know how she used to say--in the most impersonal way--‘Darling old Nick’?” His pause was lengthy. When he did go on with it, I had the feeling of listening to thoughts instead of to words. “I never, in the course of our married life, had the conviction of having touched her in the flesh. It used to make me shy with her. And that last night she had a more than ever silvery laugh. I felt as if all my life I must stand a way off from her, looking at her with my arms hanging. It was the swift precision of her reply to what I asked her: ‘Of course I love you.’” He sat tapping a cigarette on the back of his hand. His eyes were fixed on the cigarette, as if it were an important thing. When he again looked at me, he said: “I find this very difficult.”