Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened; but what was the use of thinking of that now? He tried to turn his thoughts to more urgent issues; but, by a strange perversity of association, every detail of the day was forcing itself on his mind with an insistence from which there was no escape. Reluctantly he relived the long wet walk back to the hotel, after a tedious hour at a cinematograph show on the Boulevard. It was still raining when they withdrew from this stale spectacle, but she had obstinately refused to take a cab, had even, on the way, insisted on loitering under the dripping awnings of shop-windows and poking into draughty passages, and finally, when they had nearly reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that they should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre at the Batignolles. But at that he had somewhat irritably protested: he remembered that, for the first time, they were both rather irritable, and vaguely disposed to resist one another’s suggestions. His feet were wet, and he was tired of walking, and sick of the smell of stuffy unaired theatres, and he had said he must really get back to write some letters--and so they had kept on to the hotel... XXVII Darrow had no idea how long he had sat there when he heard Anna’s hand on the door. The effort of rising, and of composing his face to meet her, gave him a factitious sense of self-control. He said to himself: “I must decide on something----” and that lifted him a hair’s breadth above the whirling waters. She came in with a lighter step, and he instantly perceived that something unforeseen and reassuring had happened. “She’s been with me. She came and found me on the terrace. We’ve had a long talk and she’s explained everything. I feel as if I’d never known her before!” Her voice was so moved and tender that it checked his start of apprehension. “She’s explained----?” “It’s natural, isn’t it, that she should have felt a little sore at the kind of inspection she’s been subjected to? Oh, not from you--I don’t mean that! But Madame de Chantelle’s opposition--and her sending for Adelaide Painter! She told me frankly she didn’t care to owe her husband to Adelaide Painter...She thinks now that her annoyance at feeling herself so talked over and scrutinized may have shown itself in her manner to Owen, and set him imagining the insane things he did...I understand all she must have felt, and I agree with her that it’s best she should go away for a while. She’s made me,” Anna summed up, “feel as if I’d been dreadfully thick-skinned and obtuse!” “YOU?” “Yes. As if I’d treated her like the bric-a-brac that used to be sent down here ‘on approval,’ to see if it would look well with the other pieces.” She added, with a sudden flush of enthusiasm: “I’m glad she’s got it in her to make one feel like that!”