Reardon did not knock at her door. He opened it and went in and Esther even passionately received him. They greeted each other like acknowledged lovers, and he stood holding her to him while she sobbed bitterly against his arm. "What business had he?" he kept repeating. "What business had he?" "I can't talk about it," said Esther. "But I can never go through it again. You must take me away." "I'm going myself," said Reardon. "I'm booked for Liverpool." Esther was spent with the weariness of the years that had brought her no compensating joys for her meagre life with grandmother upstairs and her most uneasy one since Madame Beattie came. How could she, even if Reardon furnished money for it, be sure to free herself from Jeff in time to taste some of the pleasures she craved while she was at her prime of beauty? After all, there were other lands to wander in; it wasn't necessary to sit down here and do what Addingtonians had done since they settled the wretched place on the date they seemed to find so sacred. So she told him, in a poor sad little whisper: "I shall die if you leave me." "I won't go," said Reardon, at once. "I'll stand by." "You will go," said Esther fiercely, half in anger because he had to be cajoled and prompted, "and take me with you." Reardon, standing there feeling her beating heart against his hand, thought that was how he had known it would be. He had always had a fear, the three-o'clock-waking-in-the-morning fear, that sometime his conventions would fall from him like a garment he had forgotten, and he should do some act that showed him to Addington as he was born. He had too, sometimes, a nightmare, pitifully casual, yet causing him an anguish of shame: murdering his grammar or smoking an old black pipe such as his father smoked and being caught with it, going to the club in overalls. But now he realised what the malicious envy of fortune had in store for him. He was to run off with his neighbour's wife. For an instant he weakly meant to recall her to herself, to remind her that she didn't want to do it. But it seemed shockingly indecorous to assume a higher standard than her own, and all he could do was to assure her, as he had been assuring her while he was swept along that dark underground river of disconcerted thought: "I'll take care of you." "What do you mean?" she returned, like a wild thing leaping at him. "Do you mean really take care of me? over there?" "Yes," said Reardon, without a last clutch at his lost vision, "over there. We'll leave here Friday, for New York." "I shall send my trunks in advance," said Esther. "By express. I shall say I am going for dressmaking and the theatre."