But at any rate he could picture them: the ladies—Lady Gale, Alice Du Cane, Mrs. Lester, his wife, even poor Mrs. Lawrence—sitting there, on the edge of the hill, silent, alert, listening. What a picnic! But their alertness, or rather their terrible eagerness to avoid seeming alert, horrified him. They seemed to pursue him, all five of them, during those two dreadful days with questioning glances; only his wife, by her curious patient intentness, as though she were waiting for the crisis to come, frightened him most of all. The more he thought of her strange behaviour the less he understood her. It was all so utterly unlike her. And it was not as though she had altered at all in other ways. He had heard her talking to other people, he had watched her scolding the girls, and it was the same sharp, shrill voice, the same fierce assumption that the person she was with must necessarily be trying to “get” at her; no, she was the same Emmy Maradick as far as the rest of the world was concerned. But, with him, she was some one altogether new, some one he had never seen before; and always, through it all, that strange look of wonder and surprise. He often knew that her eyes were upon him when he was talking to some one else; when he talked to her himself her eyes avoided him. And then Mrs. Lester, too, was so strange. During the whole of Tuesday she avoided him altogether. He had a few minutes with her at teatime, but there were other people there, and she seemed anxious to get away from him, to put the room between them. And seeing her like this, his passion grew. He felt that whatever happened, whatever the disaster, he must have her, once at least, in his arms again. The memories of their other meetings lashed him like whips. He pictured it again, the darkness, the movement of the trees, the touch of her cheek against his hand; and then he would feel that his wife was looking at him from somewhere across the room. He could feel her eyes, like little gimlets, twisting, turning into his back. And then other moods would come, and the blackest despair. He was this kind of man, this sort of scoundrel; he remembered once that there had been a man at Epsom who had run away with a married woman, a man who had been rather a friend of his. He remembered what he had said to him, the kind of way that he had looked at him, poor, rotten creature; and now what was he? But he could not go; he could not move. He was under a spell. When he thought of Mrs. Lester his blood would begin to race again. He told himself that it was the sign of his freedom, the natural consequences of the new life that had come to him; and then suddenly he would see that moment when his wife, sitting forlornly on his bed, had spoken to him.