As he said this he met her eyes, and had a sudden persuasion that she knew exactly what it was the telegram had told him, and that she was shocked at this gala-like treatment of such terrible news. He hesitated, feeling that he had to say something else, that he was socially inadequate, and then he decided that at any cost he must get his face away from her staring eyes. She made no movement to turn away. She seemed to be taking him in, recording him, for repetition, greedily, with every fibre of her being. He stepped past her into the garden, and instantly forgot about her existence.... Section 22 He had been thinking of this possibility for the last few weeks almost continuously, and yet now that it had come to him he felt that he had never thought about it before, that he must go off alone by himself to envisage this monstrous and terrible fact, without distraction or interruption. He saw his wife coming down the alley between the roses. He was wrenched by emotions as odd and unaccountable as the emotions of adolescence. He had exactly the same feeling now that he had had when in his boyhood some unpleasant admission had to be made to his parents. He felt he could not go through a scene with her yet, that he could not endure the task of telling her, of being observed. He turned abruptly to his left. He walked away as if he had not seen her, across his lawn towards the little summer-house upon a knoll that commanded the high road. She called to him, but he did not answer.... He would not look towards her, but for a time all his senses were alert to hear whether she followed him. Safe in the summer-house he could glance back. It was all right. She was going into the house. He drew the telegram from his pocket again furtively, almost guiltily, and re-read it. He turned it over and read it again.... _Killed._ Then his own voice, hoarse and strange to his ears, spoke his thought. "My God! how unutterably silly.... Why did I let him go? Why did I let him go?" Section 23 Mrs. Britling did not learn of the blow that had struck them until after dinner that night. She was so accustomed to ignore his incomprehensible moods that she did not perceive that there was anything tragic about him until they sat at table together. He seemed heavy and sulky and disposed to avoid her, but that sort of moodiness was nothing very strange to her. She knew that things that seemed to her utterly trivial, the reading of political speeches in _The Times_, little comments on life made in the most casual way, mere movements, could so avert him. She had cultivated a certain disregard of such fitful darknesses. But at the dinner-table she looked up, and was stabbed to the heart to see a haggard white face and eyes of deep despair regarding her ambiguously. "Hugh!" she said, and then with a chill intimation, "_What is it?_" They looked at each other. His face softened and winced. "My Hugh," he whispered, and neither spoke for some seconds.