As a practical matter, it became more and more difficult to carry on the pose that everything was all right. His secret burden became almost intolerable. He wanted to tell some one. But who could understand? Not Clive, not Phyllis.... He stayed in the studio every moment when he was not in the office, for fear she would return and not find him there. He must be there when she came back. It never occurred to him that she might not come back. The issue in his own mind was clear—he had gone over it a thousand times; at night he rehearsed it to himself sleeplessly, hour after hour. _He had made a fool of himself. But it had been her fault._ Yes, her fault. That was why he could not write. He would have to write humbly, if he wrote at all; and he was in no humble mood. His loneliness, his need of her, only exasperated his sense of the injury she had done him.... She had urged him on to folly—that was hard enough to forgive—and then she had turned and fled from a situation which she herself had created.... All this could be discussed and understood between them; but first she must come back. That surrender was essential. It was hard to stick it out this way, in lonely, sleepless waiting. But she knew—it was her own fault; her return would be an admission of that. _Then_ he could say how ashamed he was of himself. But first.... He must wait—till she came back. Who had talked of “freedom”? Who had refused to face the facts of marriage? Who had engineered, planned, touched the match to this explosion? She knew well enough! He need not say these things to her, ever. She would confess them by her return. That would be enough. She was stubborn—but he was still more stubborn. He could wait. She would come back—and then.... They would start all over again—sensibly. 5 Rose-Ann, meanwhile, as her husband supposed, was at her father’s home in Springfield. If her presence there excited any curiosity, she was scarcely aware of it. She was not concerned with anything but the problem of herself and Felix.... She was not, however, as he sometimes imagined, waiting for a letter from him to make easy her return home. She was, as she had told him, trying to “think things out.” She had gone away with that sentence of his ringing in her mind: “_So you didn’t mean it after all!_” She had not slept that night, on the train; nor very much since that time. She was too busy trying to think things out; and the chief thing to think out was: _had_ she meant it when she offered Felix his freedom? No, obviously enough! And yet her pride revolted from that fact. Had she been a liar, a hypocrite, all this while? Had she only pretended? It was too shameful.... She really had meant it. She had been in earnest. She had understood what she was saying. She _had_ thought she could do it....