He suddenly wanted to scream, to shout something at her like “Speak, you devil!” or “don’t go on saying nothing, you mummy, sitting still like that.” At last he did speak. “You’re late, Emmy,” he said, “I thought you’d have been in bed.” His voice was very gentle. If only she would stop moving that brush up and down with its almost mechanical precision! She put the brush slowly down on the table and turned towards him. “Yes,” she said, “I was waiting for you, really, until you came up.” He was suddenly convinced that she knew; she had probably known all about it from the first. She was such a clever little woman, there were very few things that she didn’t know. He waited stupidly, dully. He wondered what she was going to say, what she was going to propose that they should do. But having got so far, she seemed to have nothing more to say. She stared at the glass with wide, fixed eyes; her cheeks were flushed, and her fingers played nervously with the things on the dressing-table. “Well,” he said at last, “what is it?” Then, to his intense surprise, she got up and came slowly towards him; she sat on the edge of the bed whilst he watched her, wondering, amazed. He had never seen her like that before, and his intense curiosity at her condition killed, for a moment, the eagerness with which he would discover how much she knew. But her manner of taking it was surely very strange. Temper, fury, passion, even hate, that he could understand, and that, knowing her, he would have expected, but this strange dreamy quiet frightened him. He caught the bed-clothes in his hands and twisted them; then he asked again: “Well, what is it?” But when she did at last speak she did not look at him, but stared in front of her. It was the strangest thing in the world to see her sitting there, speaking like that; and he had a feeling, not to be explained, that she wasn’t there at all really, that it was some one else, even, possibly, some strange thing that his actions of these last few days had suddenly called forth—called forth, that was, to punish him. He shrunk back on to his pillows. “Well,” her voice just went on, “it isn’t that I’ve really anything to say; you’ll think me silly, and I’m sure I don’t want to keep you when you want to go to sleep. But it isn’t often that we have anything very much to say to one another; it isn’t, at any rate, very often here. We’ve hardly, you know, talked at all since we’ve been here. “But these last few days I’ve been thinking, realising perhaps, that it’s been my fault all these years that things haven’t been happier. . . . I don’t think I’d thought about anyone except myself. . . . In some sort of way I hadn’t considered you at all; I don’t quite know why.” She paused as though she expected him to say something, but he made no sound.