“And by God, I will, if it comes to that!” Rivers said, with sudden and determined emphasis. He strode to the door. “Now, Madam, have the goodness to leave my room.” He held the door open for her as she passed out. He was white with rage. “I am sure I thought I heard you say it was the common parlour?” the terrible woman remarked to him, over her shoulder. * * * * * A moment later, he seized his hat and went out. Jane Anne was waiting for him in the passage, her comely face marred with tears. She caught his hand and held it. “Oh, Mr. Rivers, do please forgive me! Mrs. Topham wrote the letter, she did indeed, and the other lady stayed here all night--and saw you---- ” He shook her hand off his sleeve, and passed out into the road, without even looking at her. Jane Anne looked at her hand--the hand he had disdained--as if she would like to cut it off. Her heavy brows contracted--met together in a dull frown of rage and disappointment. “Then I’ll just swear anything they like!” she muttered to herself. CHAPTER X Mrs. Elles, on arriving at Newcastle, took a fly and drove straight up to her own door. This detail was significant of the course she had undertaken to pursue, and the attitude she meant to assume with regard to her own life--what was left of it. She was only thirty, she had presumably as many years again to live, and she had no intention of committing suicide. On the contrary, she meant to go through the process known as picking up the pieces. Her policy of life was optimism--pessimism was her pose. But her unconscious tendency was to look forward--very much forward. The past she ignored, the present she disdained, the future she brooded over. It had always been so with her, even in the old days before this cyclone of emotion had swept over her, and the trivial round of things pleasant and unpleasant had been all her care and preoccupation. It would be so again. She had the peculiar shrewdness of the feather-brained, the perspicacity of the trivial-minded; and the practical basis of her nature, which had been overlaid and smothered for a time by her spasmodic access of passion for the artist, began to re-assert itself. As the train passed easily through stations and scenes familiar, the domestic campaign of the immediate future took form and shape in her mind.