He did so, and advanced towards the bed. His face wore an expression of concern, and he walked on tiptoe. “I fainted while I was out with Ireen,” Elsie explained, “and I was simply ages coming to. We came back in a cab, and I must say Ireen’s awfully selfish. She wouldn’t come in with me, though she must have seen I wasn’t fit to be left--just turned and walked off. I’m done with her, after this.” “Where had you been?” enquired Williams quickly. “Oh, just out.” “Where to?” “I suppose you’ll call me a fool, if I say it was to see one of those clairvoyante women, someone Ireen had heard of. It was all Ireen’s doing--she persuaded me to go.” “Very silly of you both,” said the little solicitor coldly. “Did this person upset you?” “Yes. She had a sort of fit, I think, and called out a whole lot of nonsense, only I can’t remember what it was.” Elsie moved uneasily. “Where does she live?” “Why?” “She ought to be prosecuted for obtaining money under false pretences. I suppose you gave her money?” “Oh yes.” “You’d better give me her name and address and I’ll see that she is properly dealt with.” “I’d rather not.” Horace Williams shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’d better get up and come down to supper, hadn’t you? There’s no reason for lying in bed if you’re not ill.” “All right,” Elsie agreed sullenly. Her husband never shouted at her or threatened her, but she was afraid of him, and of a certain sinister dryness that characterised his manner when he was displeased. The dryness was there now. Elsie spent the evening downstairs. Her husband read the newspaper, and she turned over the pages of a fashion magazine listlessly. Her thoughts, unwillingly enough, returned again and again to the scene in the clairvoyante’s room, but still she could not remember the actual words screamed out by Madame Clara before she had lost consciousness. But she remembered quite well other words, that had preceded them. “You are magnetic ... extraordinarily magnetic.... You are not awake--your mind is asleep.... Now, you are bored, satiated. You are ceaselessly craving for a new emotion....” Elsie reflected how true this was. She glanced distastefully at her elderly husband. The bald patch glistened on the top of his head, and he was breathing heavily as he read his newspaper. He had always been rather distasteful to her physically, and although the continuous, degradingly inevitable proximity of married life in a small suburban villa had hardened her into indifference, Elsie was still averse from the more intimate aspects of marriage with him. She wished that she could fall in love, remembering that Madame Clara had said: “I see love here--love that you have never known yet.” “That’s bunkum,” thought Elsie. “I’ve been in love heaps of times--I was in love with that doctor fellow, Woolley. It doesn’t last, that’s all.” She hardly ever met any men nowadays, as she resentfully reminded herself.