She went to an oak table behind the sofa, on which the maid had set the tea-things without awakening him, and sat there quietly watching the kettle. The early London twilight began to veil the room. Ian stirred on the sofa and sat up, with his back to her, unconscious of her presence. She rose, vaguely supposing herself about to address some gentle word to him. Then suddenly she had thrown one soft hand under his chin and one across his eyes, and with a _brusquerie_ quite unnatural to her pulled him backwards, while a ripple of laughter so strange as to be shocking in her own ears burst from her lips, which cried aloud with a defiant gayety: "Who, Ian? Guess!" Ian, with a sudden force as strange to her as her own laughter, her own gay cry, pulled her hands away, held them an instant fast; then, kneeling on the sofa, he caught her in his long arms across the back of it, and after the pressure of a kiss upon her lips such as she had never felt before, breathed with a voice of unutterable gladness: "Mildred! Darling! Dearest love!" A hoarse cry, almost a shriek, broke from the lips of Milly. The woman he held struggled from his arms and stared at him wildly in the veiling twilight. A strange horror fell upon him, and for several seconds he remained motionless, leaning over the back of the sofa. Then, groping towards the wall, he switched on the electric light. He saw it plainly, the white mask of a woman smitten with a mortal blow. "Milly," he uttered, stammeringly. "What's the matter? You are ill." She turned on him her heart-broken look, then pressing her hand to her throat, spoke as though with difficulty. "I love you very much--you don't know how much I love you. I've tried so hard to be a good wife to you." Ian perceived catastrophe, yet dimly; sought with desperate haste to remember why for a moment he had believed that that Other was come back; what irreparable thing he had said or done. Meantime he must say something. "Milly, dear! What's gone wrong? What have I done, child?" "You've let her take you--" She spoke more freely now, but with a startling fierceness--"You've let her take you from me." "Ah, the old trouble! My poor Milly! I know it's terrible for you. I can only say that no one else really exists; that you are always you really." "That's not true. You don't believe it yourself. That wicked creature has made you love her--her own wicked way. You want to have her instead of me; you want to destroy your own wife and to get her back again." The cruel, ultimate truth that Milly's words laid bare--the truth which he constantly refused to look upon, in mercy to himself and her--paralyzed the husband's tongue. He tried to approach her with vague words and gestures of affection and remonstrance, but she motioned him from her. "No. Don't say you love me; I can't believe it, and I hate to hear you say what's not true."