At half-past seven that evening Cecil turned the key in the door and went into the house. It was the first time he had ever come home with a feeling of uneasiness and dread; a sensation at once of fear and of boredom. Until now he had always known that he would receive a delighted welcome, all sweetness and affection. He had always had the delicious incense of worshipping admiration swung before him in the perfumed atmosphere of love and peace. Had he held all this too cheaply? Had he accepted the devotion a little pontifically and condescendingly? Had he been behaving like a pompous ass? He had really enjoyed his wife's homage the more because he had liked to think that he still yearned for the impossible, that he had been deprived by Fate of his ideal, that absence and distance had only raised higher in his thoughts the one romantic passion of his life. What a fool he had been! All he felt at this moment about Eugenia was impatient annoyance. There is a great deal of the schoolboy in an Englishman of thirty. Cecil just now regarded her simply as the person who had got him into a row. Why had she taken him for that imprudent drive? As he went into the little boudoir it happened that Hyacinth was turning her back to him. It was usually a part of their ritual that she came to meet him. So this seemed to him an evil omen. She stood looking out of the window, very tall, very slender, her brown hair piled in its dense mass on her small head. When she turned round he saw she held a telegram in her hand. 'What is the meaning of this?' she said, as she held it out to him. He took it from her and sat down to read it, feeling as he did so unpleasantly heavy, stupid, and stolid in contrast to the flash of her blue eyes and the pale tragedy in her face. It was the first time he had ever felt her inferior. As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated. 'What does it mean?' he said. 'Why it means that they have to put us off. They are evidently going away. What it means is fairly obvious.' 'Ah, _why_ have they put us off? You have been to see her! You must have arranged this. Yes, you have given me away to her, Cecil; you have let her know I was jealous! It is worse than anything else! I shall never forgive you for this.' He gave her back the telegram with an air of dazed resignation. 'My dear girl, I give you my solemn word of honour that I know nothing whatever about it.' 'Really? Well, it is very strange. It is most extraordinary! She says she is writing. I suppose we shall hear.' 'Are we going to have dinner?' 'You agree to what I suggested this morning, Cecil?' 'No, I don't.' 'Very well, then; I shan't dine with you.' 'Oh, confound it! I don't want to go out again.' 'Pray don't. I shall dine in my room,' and she walked to the door. As she left the room she turned round and said--