Quickly she wheeled to her husband. "I don't want to go in here," she said. "What?" Jim was utterly dumfounded. She caught the lapels of his coat and held him, with his back to the room, in the position that he had thus far maintained. "I say that I don't want to go in. Take me away. Here, these are the stairs. I'm tired. It's vulgar. I'm not well." She released her hold of him and started to descend alone. He was forced to follow with hardly the chance to get his coat and hat. In the motor-car she grasped his face in her hot hands and fell, between sobs, to kissing him. "I love you!--I love you!" she cried. The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen. XIII WORMWOOD When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed, often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply, bidding her sleep and not bother. Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the turned door knob had roused her, was the glance that might be expected of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed. Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes and gladly let him go. On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that he might pass and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their surmise and the truth.