Nevertheless, yesterday’s events had left their mark on her. Besides the suffering woven with many threads which henceforth must envelop her life, the actual, temporary excitement had been too violent not to affect her for some time to come. She was irritable and nervous to a miserable extent. Geoffrey’s creaking boots, the hasty closing of a door, even his voice, not always modulated to a nicety, nearly drove her frantic. Then sharp words were followed by bitter self-reproach and abasement. It was so undignified, so lowering, she said to herself, thus to bear her trial. If she had been called upon to do something great or heroic—to throw herself into fire or water to save the husband she did not love, it would have been easy. But to feel herself tied to him in this matter-of-fact way, to know that it was her duty to listen with patience, if not interest, to his commonplace conversation, his stupid talk of weather and crops or his anticipations of the coming season’s hunting—oh, this indeed was martyrdom, all but unendurable. For in these days she was far, very far from doing justice to the real character of the man she had married. They did not stay long at the Peacock. The place grew hateful to her. At first there was a sort of fascination about the old arbour in the garden; she had a childish unreasoning fancy that some day Ralph would appear there again; that finding his life unendurable without her he would return in very recklessness of misery to see her again, if but for a moment. But he never came, and she learnt to loathe the place associated with such ever-recurring disappointment. There were times when she blamed herself bitterly for her behaviour to him during that last interview. She had been cold, repellent; she had belied herself in concealing from him, as she fancied she had, the depth, the intensity of her devotion, the anguish of parting from him forever. He had gone away, she thought, suffering in himself, terribly no doubt, but with no conception of the awfulness of the misery which he was leaving her to bear alone. Had he realised it would he have left her?—would he not, he was wise and far-seeing, have devised some means of freeing her from this terrible bondage, of even now joining her life to his, where alone it would be worthy of the name?