Then suddenly a new fear comes to him. She has been home all the time. She has brought her lover with her and refuses to be disturbed. He can see them in the warm dusk of her room, the small table lamp casting through its silk covering a pale rose radiance upon the white linen of the lace-fringed pillows, heightening the beauty of her face, as she turns it to meet his kisses. There is the ring of the telephone in the other room. “Your silly old man,” he says, and they laugh together. And he places his hands over her ears that she shall not hear it, and his lips wander over her face and neck. The bell stops ringing, and once more his hands are about her and his mouth is against her ear whispering: “Now I can tell you again how much I love you.” He sees it with the hard clarity of jealousy and foiled desire. He rises quickly, pushing his chair sideways as he does so, and strides backwards and forwards across the room. There is the sound of an opening door upon the landing, the patter of slippered feet upon the staircase, the rap of a knuckle in the passage. “Come in,” he says. And his wife is standing in the doorway. Old and shrivelled and pathetic she looks, with her sparse hair falling over the black and gold of her long silk dressing-gown. And yet she is younger than he is; he remembers they are both old stuff, and there rises in him the suffocating need for sympathy, for maternal kindliness, for someone to whom he can say in his loneliness: “I’m tired; I’m an old man: be good to me.” “But, my dear,” she says, “I thought you would be at the House all night.” “I know, I know,” he says, on his guard instantly against surrender. “It wasn’t very interesting, and I thought--well, I just came back and I’ve been reading for a few minutes before going up.” But the moment he has said it he realises that she does not believe him. She has heard the crash of his chair beside the telephone: that is what has awakened her; and she has heard him striding up and down the room, and there is no book lying open on the table; there is no chair drawn before the fire, and in the grate only a few dull coals; no whisky on the small table; no cigar smoke; no feature of the usual setting for an evening’s reading, and, after thirty years of marriage, a wife knows her husband’s habits. “My dear,” she begins. But he will not let her finish. At all events he must protect himself against discovery and against this fatal weakness in himself that would fling him before her on his knees and on her pity. “It’s quite all right,” he says; “I shall be going up in a minute. I just want to settle my mind a bit first. I can’t sleep if I’m at all excited. And you’ll be catching cold, dear, here. You mustn’t stay, really, in that dressing-gown.”