“Oh, I forgot,” she exclaimed, taking her hands out of her lap, and becoming suddenly and inefficiently active. Rivers never got a worse cup of tea in his life, probably, than the one Mrs. Elles gave him that morning, and he took it without sugar, comment, or complaint. They ate and drank in silence. Mrs. Elles could bear anything but that. “Will you look out a train for me--a train home?” she asked, in tones as nearly devoid of all emotion as she could compass. “I will, if you will tell me where you live!” he replied, with equal coldness. “Newcastle,” she murmured, in a voice choked with incipient sobs. He opened the Guide with cruelly assured hands. “There is a train at 12:45,” he said, looking up. But the strain had been too much for her, she had flung down her napkin, and had risen from the table, and hurrying across the room to the sofa, had flung herself down there in a heap, with her face to the wall. He caught the white gleam of a pocket handkerchief, which alone told him she was weeping. There was a silence. Rivers groaned--the nervous groan of a man who is too well bred to swear at a woman. She tried to refrain from sobbing aloud. She lay quite still. Her eyes, half open in the dim penumbra of the sofa corner, saw only, as in a nightmare, its rough horse-hair surface, like a dreary hill, studded with briars of incommensurate proportions, and over which she somehow imagined herself climbing. Her ears, preposterously sharpened by her excitement, next heard the faint click of a teacup, hastily pushed aside. A panic fear overcame her, lest this should be the signal of his rising, and that the clash of the door closing behind him, as she had heard it last night, and remembered it, would be the next sound that would come to her ears. But as in some stages of the mesmeric trance, she was powerless to stop him; she would not be able to raise a finger even to save her life, and her life it would be that she would lose. He would go out of the room--out of her world for ever! She listened ... her ears were tingling ... it was positive pain.... He did rise--and she presently felt his hand on her shoulder, and heard strange, unexpected words of tenderness from his lips. “Dear--I love you--but what can I do? You are another man’s wife.” She turned her whole body round, and caught his arm to her, and hid her face on his sleeve. “Yes, I know, but can you ever forgive me--for the lies I have told you? That is what I want to know.” “I have said that I loved you,” he said, simply. “I can’t say more than that. Women are different, I suppose.” She never remembered anything sadder than the sigh with which he said this. She realized that in order to exonerate the woman he said he cared for, and to condone her fault, he had been obliged to involve the whole of her sex in her disgrace, and to set all womankind a few degrees lower.