He broke off, and buried his face in his hands, murmuring incoherent things. Marcella rose hurriedly, then stood motionless, her head turned from him, that she might not hear. She felt herself stifled with rising tears. Once or twice she began to speak, and the words died away again. At last she said, bending towards him: "I have done very ill--very, _very_ ill. I have been thinking all through of my personal want--of personal victory." He shook his head, protesting. And she hardly knew how to go on. But suddenly the word of nature, of truth, came; though in the speaking it startled them both. "Sir George!"--she put out her hand timidly and touched him--"may I tell you what I am thinking of? Not of you, nor of me--of another person altogether!" He looked up. "My wife?" he said, almost in his usual voice. She said nothing; she was struggling with herself. He got up abruptly, walked to the open window, stood there a few seconds, and came back. "It has to be all thought out again," he said, looking at her appealingly. "I must go away, perhaps--and realise--what can be done. I took marriage as carelessly as I took everything else. I must try and do better with it." A sudden perception leapt in Marcella, revealing strange worlds. How she could have hated--with what fierceness, what flame!--the woman who taught ideal truths to Maxwell! She thought of the little self-complacent being in the white satin wedding-dress, that had sat beside her at Castle Luton--thought of her with overwhelming soreness and pain. Stepping quickly, her tears driven back, she went across the room to Tressady. "I don't know what to say," she began, stopping suddenly beside him, and leaning her hand for support on a table while her head drooped. "I have been very selfish--very blind. But--mayn't it be the beginning--of something quite--quite--different? I was thinking only of Maxwell--or myself. But I ought to have thought of you--of my friend. I ought to have seen--but oh! how _could_ I!" She broke off, wrestling with this amazing difficulty of choosing, amid all the thoughts that thronged to her lips, something that might be said--and if said, might heal. But before he could interrupt her, she went on: "The harm was, in acting all through--by myself--as if only you and I, and Maxwell's work--were concerned. If I had made you known to _him_--if I had remembered--had thought--" But she stopped again, in a kind of bewilderment. In truth she did not yet understand what had happened to her--how it could have happened to her--to _her_, whose life, soul, and body, to the red ripe of its inmost heart, was all Maxwell's, his possession, his chattel. Tressady looked at her with a little sad smile. "It was your unconsciousness," he said, in a low trembling voice, "of what you are--and have--that was so beautiful."