"It's my fault. All this is my fault. I'm eating you up. What's the good of your pretending, Rag. You know it is. Oh! When I married you I meant to make you happy, I had no thought but to make you happy, to give myself to you, my body, my brains, everything, to make life beautiful for you----" "Well, _haven't_ you?" He thrust out a hand she did not take. "I've broken your back," she said. An unwonted resolution came into her face. Her lips whitened. "Don't you know, Rag," she said, forcing herself to speak----"Don't you guess? You don't know half! In that bureau there----In there! It's stuffed with bills. Unpaid bills." She was weeping, with no attempt to wipe the streaming tears away; terror made the expression of her wet face almost fierce. "Bills," she repeated. "More than a hundred pounds still. Yes! Now. _Now!_" He drew back, stared at her and with no trace of personal animus, like one who hears of a common disaster, remarked with a quiet emphasis: "Oh, _damn!_" "I know," she said, "Damn!" and met his eyes. There was a long silence between them. She produced a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. "That's what I amount to," she said. "It's your silly upbringing," he said after a long pause. "And my silly self." She stood up, unlocked and opened her littered desk, turned and held out the key to him. "Why?" he asked. "Take it. You gave me a cheque-book of my own and a corner of my own, and they--they are just ambushes--against you." He shook his head. "Take it," said Marjorie with quiet insistence. He obeyed. She stood with her eyes on the crumpled heap of bills. They were not even tidily arranged. That seemed to her now an extreme aggravation of her offence. "I ought to be sent to the chemist's," she remarked, "as one sends a worthless cat." Trafford weighed this proposition soberly for some moments. "You're a bother, Marjorie," he said with his eyes on the desk; "no end of a bother. I'd better have those bills." He looked at her, stood up, put his hands on her shoulders, drew her to him and kissed her forehead. He did it without passion, without tenderness, with something like resignation in his manner. She clung to him tightly, as though by clinging she could warm and soften him. "Rag," she whispered; "all my heart is yours.... I want to help you.... And this is what I have done." "I know," he said--almost grimly. He repeated his kiss. Then he seemed to explode again. "Gods!" he cried, "look at the clock. I shall miss that Croydon lecture!" He pushed her from him. "Where are my boots?..." § 7