The poor fellow was glad enough to rest, glad, too, to get away from the dreadful men’s lodging house in the city. Minnie met him every day and brought him things to eat, which he took back to his clean, lonely little room and consumed with relish. Minnie explained to him that the family where she was housekeeper was very wasteful, very capricious. “You might just as well have this,” she would say, “Otherwise it would only be thrown away.” Naturally he was not altogether happy in such an existence, living on his wife’s earnings, taking money from her even for his cigarettes, fed with the munificent scraps from her employer’s table. He had nothing to do, no living soul to speak to, he was ill and growing no better. But he wasn’t anything like so miserable as one might imagine. His feelings were all dull, torpid; he really didn’t think at all. He was forced--literally forced by nature to lie quiescent, to rest. He was, in a way, beginning to be healed of his terrible moral wounds in this solitude and idleness he so needed. He was not under the influence of anyone now; he was little by little going back to his old traditions. And then came Minnie’s note; exactly what the familiar phrase calls a “bolt from the blue,” a dazzling and awful blow. “Dearest Lionel: For reasons which I will explain when I see you, I have thought best to call myself Mr. Petersen’s wife. I want you to come back with him and I will explain _everything_. He thinks you are my brother, named Alec. Don’t say anything to him, but wait until you have seen me. I am very ill. I cannot write any more. MINNIE.” Even then he hadn’t been much impressed; he did not realise what her words implied. Simply another piece of her tiresome chicanery; posing as someone’s wife to make herself more important, or something of that sort. Treachery to himself he never suspected, or that she could possibly be actually guilty of bigamy.... Until Mr. Petersen told him of the baby that was expected. Minnie was to be the mother of another man’s child! Oh, even she couldn’t explain that away, couldn’t make him swallow that! He might be contemptible, a tool in her hands, but there was a limit, an end! He walked beside the innocent other man in the dark, smiling grimly to himself, filled with a curiously impersonal thirst for revenge. That woman must be exposed, disgraced, crushed. He was savagely delighted to do it. A long repressed and unrecognised wish came struggling to the surface of his mind, the wish to be free of her and her domination. So long as she loved him and was faithful to him, worked and schemed for him, he couldn’t even wish to be rid of her. Only falseness in her could justify him, and he rejoiced now in finding her false. “It’s the end of her,” he reflected, “of her and her beastly trickery!”