"I assure you, Mr. Bradley, she is better without it," he succumbed meekly, even slavishly, I thought, and shook his head at Margarita's pleading eyes. In the centre of the table was a graceful silver dish, filled with fruit, and as the attendant _bonne_ left the room, Margarita, with a little cooing throaty cry, reached over to it, seized with incredible swiftness two great handfuls of the fruit, and leaping from her seat retreated with her booty to the _salon_. For a second she stood in the doorway, two yellow bananas hugged to her breast among the rich lace, an orange in her elbow, her teeth plunged into a great black Hamburg grape, her eyes two dark blue mutinies. Roger burst into a Homeric laugh and even Miss Jencks smiled apologetically. "I suppose we must let her have the fruit," she conceded, "an old friend like Mr. Jerrolds will make allowance--" "We expect the child in June," said Roger simply, and then something seemed literally to give way in my brain and I clutched the table-cloth as a sharp hard pain darted through my temples. Strange, unbelievable though it may seem, I had never thought of such a thing as this! [Illustration: FOR HOURS AND HOURS I WALKED, MUTTERING AND CURSING] My face must have excused my brusque departure, my utter inability to eat or drink another mouthful. I muttered something about a rough voyage and my land-legs (I, who never knew the meaning of _mal-de-mer_!) and I know my forehead must have been drawn, for Miss Jencks pressed _sal volatile_ upon me solicitously. Roger, manlike, let me get off immediately and alone, as I begged, and once at the bottom of the interminable stairs, I flung myself into a wandering _fiacre_, and drove through the merry, lighted Paris boulevards, a helpless prey to passions black and bitter--to a wicked, seething jealousy such as I had never dreamed possible to a decent man. _That_ was the deep throat, the large and lovely arm! _That_ was the dreamy, full-fed calm, the woman ruminant! God! how the thought tortured and tore at me! I, who had thought myself cured and a philosopher--a kindly philosopher! My first fit of love for her had carried its exaltation with it, but in this grinding, physical rage there was only shame and madness. I caught, somehow, a train for Calais, I stumbled onto a boat there in a driving rain, and walked the deck in it all night. I travelled blindly to Oxford and tramped through soggy, steaming lanes, through sheets of drizzle, through icy runnels and marshy grass. For hours and hours I walked, muttering and cursing, my teeth chattering in my head, my brain on fire, my feet slushing in my soaking boots. I did not know clearly where I was, I did not know why I was walking nor where, but walk I must, like the convicts on the treadmill. Something laughed horribly in the air just behind me and said like a parrot, over and over again: "We expect the child in June! We expect the child in June! We expect the child--"