All resentment had faded from his heart when he went in to her. He had longed for reconciliation and for reassurance. But as he had looked at the seeming calm of Karen's face his tenderness and compunction passed into a bitter consciousness of frustrated love. Her calm was like a repulse. Their personal estrangement and misunderstanding left her unmoved. She had said what she had to say to him; she had vindicated her guardian; and now she slept, unmindful of him. He asked himself, and for the first time clearly and steadily, as he lay awake for hours afterwards in the little dressing-room bed, whether Karen's feelings for him passed beyond a faithful, sober affection that took him for granted, unhesitatingly and uncritically, as a new asset in a life dedicated elsewhere. Romance for her was personified in Tante, and her husband was a creature of mere kindly domesticity. It was to think too bitterly of Karen's love for him to see it thus, he knew, even while the torment grasped him; but the pressure of his own love for her, the loveliness, the romance that she so supremely personified for him, surged too strongly against the barrier of her mute, unanswering face, for him to feel temperately and weigh fairly. There was a lack in her, and because of it she hurt him thus cruelly. They met next morning over a mutual misinterpretation, and, with a sense of mingled discord and relief, found themselves kissing and smiling as if nothing had happened. Pride sustained them; the hope that, since the other seemed so unconscious, a hurt dealt so unconsciously need not, for pride's sake, be resented; the fear that explanation or protest might emphasise estrangement. The easiest thing to do was to go on acting as if nothing had happened. Karen poured out his coffee and questioned him about the latest political news. He helped her to eggs and bacon and took an interest in her letters. And since it was easiest to begin so, it was easiest so to go on. The routine of their shared life blurred for them the sharp realisations of the night. But while the fact that such suffering had come to them was one that could, perhaps, be lived down, the fact that they did not speak of it spread through all their life with a strange, new savour. Karen went to her ducal week-end; but she did not, when she came back from it, regale her husband with her usual wealth of detailed description. She could no longer assume the air of happy confidence where Tante and her doings with Tante were concerned. That air of determined cheerfulness, that pretence that nothing was really the matter and that Tante and Gregory were bound to get on together if she took it for granted that they would, had broken down. There was relief for Gregory, though relief of a chill, grey order, in seeing that Karen had accepted the fact that he and Tante were not to get on. Yet he smarted from the new sense of being shut out from her life.