Gertrude had come back into her place. He picked up some papers and took them to the safe which stood in another corner of the room behind his writing-table. He wanted to get away from Gertrude, to be alone with his secret and concealed, without betraying his desire for solitude, for concealment. He knelt down by the safe and busied himself there quite a long time. He said to himself, "It couldn't happen. She was always honest with me. But if it did I couldn't wonder. The wonder is why she married me." He rose to his feet, saying to himself again, "It couldn't happen." With that slight readjusting movement the two men in him became one, so that when the reasoning man reached slowly his conclusion he formulated it thus: "It couldn't happen. If it did, it wouldn't happen this way. He" (even to himself he could not say "they") "would have managed better, or worse." At last his intellect, the lazy, powerful beast, was roused and dealt masterfully with the situation. He had to pass the fireplace to get back to his seat, which Gertrude guarded. As he passed he caught sight of his own face in the glass over the chimney-piece, a face with inflamed eyes and a forehead frowning and overcast, and cheeks flushed with shame. Gertrude, looking up at him from the manuscript she brooded over, instinctively made way for him to pass. It was she who spoke first. Her finger was on the pencil-marks again. "Then that," said she, pointing, "that is not to stand?" "Of course it isn't." He answered coldly. "It wasn't meant to. It's rubbed out." He looked at her for the first time with dislike. He did not suspect her as the source of abominable suggestion. He was only thinking that if it hadn't been for her he wouldn't have seen any of these things. She shrank before his look. "Does he think I wanted him to see it?" she said to herself. Already she was clean in her own eyes. Already she had persuaded herself that she had not wanted that. And in the same breath of thought she asked herself, "What _did_ he see?" She smiled as she answered his cold answer. "I thought it was rubbed out, but I couldn't be quite sure." They were so absorbed that they did not hear the door open. [Illustration: Jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them] Jane stood in the doorway quietly regarding them. LXV There were people who knew for a fact that Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had run away with George Tanqueray. The rumour ran through the literary circles shunned by Tanqueray and Jane. The theory of her guilt was embraced with excitement by the dreadful, clever little people. Not one of them would have confessed to a positive desire to catch her tripping. But now that the thing had happened it satisfied the craving for complete vision of the celebrated lady. It reduced considerably her baffling eminence, and dispersed once for all the impenetrable, irritating atmosphere of secrecy she had kept up.