He had passed an almost sleepless night, lying in his little dressing-room bed where, by a tacit agreement, never explicitly recognized, he had slept, now, for so many nights. Cold fears, shaped at last in definite forms, stood round him and bade him see the truth. His wife did not love him. From the beginning he had been as nothing to her compared with her guardian. The pale, hard light of her eyes as she had said to him that afternoon, "Speak!" seemed to light the darkness with bitter revelations. He knew that he was what would be called, sentimentally, a broken-hearted man; but it seemed that the process of breaking had been gradual; so that now, when his heart lay in pieces, his main feeling was not of sharp pain but of dull fatigue, not of tragic night, but of a grey commonplace from which all sunlight had slowly ebbed away. He found Mrs. Forrester in her morning-room among loudly singing canaries and pots of jonquils; and as he shook hands with her he saw that this old friend, so old and so accustomed that she was like a part of his life, was embarrassed. The wrinkles on her withered, but oddly juvenile, face seemed to have shifted to a pattern of perplexity and pained resolution. He was not embarrassed, though he was beaten and done in a way Mrs. Forrester could not guess at; yet he felt an awkwardness. They had known each other for a life-time, he and Mrs. Forrester, but they were not intimate; and how intimate they would have to become if they were to discuss with anything like frankness the causes and consequences of Madame von Marwitz's conduct! A gloomy indifference settled on Gregory as he realized that her dear friend's conduct was the one factor in the causes and consequences that Mrs. Forrester would not be able to appraise at its true significance. She shook his hand, and seating herself at a little table and slightly tapping it with her fingers, "Now, my dear Gregory," she said, "will you, please, tell me why you have acted like this?" "Isn't my case prejudged?" Gregory asked, reconstructing the scene that must have taken place last night when Madame von Marwitz had appeared before her friend. "No, Gregory; it is not," Mrs. Forrester returned with some terseness, for she felt his remark to be unbecoming. "I hope to have some sort of explanation from you." "I'm quite ready to explain; but it's hardly possible that my explanation will satisfy you," said Gregory. "You spoke, just now, when you called me up, of a situation and said I'd made it. My explanation can only consist in saying that I didn't make it; that Madame von Marwitz made it; that she came to us in order to make it and then to fix the odium of it on me." Already Mrs. Forrester had flushed. She looked hard at the pot of jonquils near her. "You really believe that?" "I do. She can't forgive me for not liking her," said Gregory. "And you don't like her. You own to it."