For the first moment, when she looked from it to her husband, her mind refused to associate him with that degradation. Reverence held her, and a sudden memory of her passion in the woods at Westleydale. Mercifully, they veiled her intelligence, and made it impossible for her to realise that he should have sunk so low. Then she remembered. She had known that it was, that it would be so, that, sooner or later, the woman would come back. Her brain conceived a curious two-fold intuition of the fact. It was all foreappointed and foreknown, that she should come to this hateful house, and should sit there, and that her eyes should be opened and that she should see. And the woman's voice rose again. "Do I see cucumber sandwiches?" said Lady Cayley. "Dick, go and tell Mr. Majendie that if he doesn't want all those sandwiches himself, I'll have one." Ransome gave the message, and Majendie turned to the lady of the settee, presenting the plate with the finest air of abstraction. Her large arm hovered in selection long enough for her to shoot out one low quick speech. "I only wanted to see if you'd cut me, Wallie. Topsy bet me two to ten you wouldn't." "Why on earth should I?" "Oh, on earth I know you wouldn't. But didn't I hear just now you'd married and gone to heaven?" "Gone to----?" "Sh--sh--sh--I'm sure she doesn't let you use those naughty words. You needn't say you're not in heaven, for I can see you are. You didn't expect to meet me there, did you?" "I certainly didn't expect to meet you here." "How can you be so rude? Dick, take that tiresome plate from him, he doesn't know what to do with it. Yes. I'll have another before it goes away for ever." Majendie had given up the plate before he realised that he was parting with the link that bound him to the outer world. He turned instantly to follow it there; but she saw his intention and frustrated it. "Butter? Ugh! You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off." She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that the operation gave her all the time she wanted. "I believe you're still afraid of me?" said she. He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as positively illuminating their end of the room. "You're not? Well, prove it." "Is it possible to prove anything to you?" Again he was about to break from her impatiently. Nothing, he had told himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her. But he saw Anne's face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of implacable repulsion. And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him. "You can prove it," said Lady Cayley, "to me and everybody else--they're all looking at you--by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to look a little less as if we compromised each other."