About an hour afterwards there was a gentle knock at her door. She made no answer, and Tressady came in. He stepped softly, thinking she was asleep, and presently she heard him stop, with a stifled exclamation. She made no sound, but from his movement she guessed that he was picking up the litter on the floor. Then she heard it thrown into the basket under her writing-table, and she waited, holding her breath. Tressady walked to a far window, drew a curtain back softly, and stood looking out at the starlight over the deserted street. Once, finding him so still, she ventured a hasty glance at him over the edge of the sheet. But she could see nothing. And after a time he turned and came to his accustomed place beside her. In twenty minutes at latest, she knew, much to her chagrin, that he was asleep. She herself had no sleep. She was stung to wakefulness by that recurrent sense of the irrevocable which makes us say to ourselves in wonder, "How can it have happened? Two hours ago--such a little while--it had not happened!" And the mind clutches at the bygone hour, so near, so eternally distant--clutches at its ghost, in vain. Yet it seemed to her now that she had been jealous from the first moment when she and George had come into contact with Marcella Maxwell. During the long hours of this night her jealousy burnt through her like a hot pain--jealousy, mixed with reluctant memory. Half consciously she had always assumed that it had been a piece of kindness on her part to marry George Tressady at all. She had almost condescended to him. After all, she had played with ambitions so much higher! At any rate, she had taken for granted that he would always admire and be grateful to her--that in return for her pretty self she might at least dispose of him and his as she pleased. And now, what galled her intolerably was this discernment of the way in which--at least since their honeymoon--he must have been criticising and judging her--judging her by comparison with another woman. She seemed to see at a glance, the whole process of his mind, and her vanity writhed under it. How much else than vanity? As she turned restlessly from side to side, possessed by plans for punishing George, for humiliating Lady Maxwell, and avenging herself, she said to herself that she did not care,--that it was not worth caring about,--that she would either bring George to his senses, or manage to amuse herself without him. But in reality she was held tortured and struggling all the time in the first grip of that masterful hold wherewith the potter lifts his clay when he lays it on the eternal whirring of the wheel. CHAPTER XVI