“Well, what do you suspect? You can speak out to me; I am not sensitive now. Has she done--the worst? You looked at her as if you could have killed her. I saw as you passed.” Poor George stared at him in consternation. “I looked--at my wife--as if I could have--killed her!” he repeated stupidly. “Yes, by Jove, you did.” George said nothing more for a few moments, being altogether shocked to learn that he could become unconsciously the most repulsive of tyrants to the very creature whom, in all the wreck of his life and his hopes, he unswervingly and with a new smarting fervour, adored. “I suppose,” he said at last, “I’m going off my head. I swear I hadn’t the least idea there was anything unusual in my manner. Poor little thing!” he murmured abstractedly, while the Colonel continued to regard him very curiously. George turned instinctively towards his home, and glanced through the trees at the windows of his wife’s room with a great yearning in his whole face. The Colonel put his arm briskly through the young man’s, and tried to lead him towards the nearest gate. They had wandered into Kensington Gardens. “Come and dine with me at the Wellington Club. I’ve called twice at your place since I left you, and have been hovering about ever since on the look-out for you. Come--a glass of Rudesheimer----” George drew back. “No, thanks, Colonel; I can’t come to-night. I must go back to my wife. You see--leaving her like that----” He stammered and stopped. The Colonel considered him again attentively. “You’ve not been telling her anything of our talk this afternoon, have you?” he asked, with a shade of contempt. “I cannot understand that craze of a newly-married man to be babbling of all his affairs to his wife. I should as soon think of consulting a new hunter as to an investment in Consols.” “I have told her nothing.” “Then what is the matter with you? You look more upset than you did this afternoon.” “I have seen Nouna’s mother.” The Colonel’s jaw dropped, and his irritability suddenly disappeared. “Madame di--di Valdestillas?” he said in a subdued, tentative tone. “Oh, no; I’ve had my way. There’s an end once for all to all humbug,” answered George bitterly. “I’ve seen Chloris White.” Then both remained silent for a while. Truly after this there seemed little to be said. At last the Colonel said in a low voice: “Now, my boy, you see what I’ve had to live through the last few years. You don’t wonder any longer at my opinion of women?” But George felt no sympathetic softening. He thought that a man should make sure of the death of his first wife before he married a second, and that he should show a little human feeling for his own daughter. “I don’t wonder either, Colonel, at Chloris White’s opinion of men,” he said drily. “You think you have a grievance against me, I see.”