“I won’t stand it,” she repeated. “No.” “But—what can you do?” “I don’t know,” she said, after a moment of grave consideration. For some moments his mind hunted among possibilities. “It’s me that’s standing it,” he said. He came closely up to her. He seemed on the verge of rhetoric. He pressed his thin white lips together. “Standing it! when we might be so happy,” he snapped, and shrugged his shoulders and turned with an expression of mournful resolution towards the house again. She followed slowly. He felt that he had done all that a patient and reasonable husband could do. _Now_—things must take their course. §5 The imprisonment of Lady Harman at Black Strand lasted just one day short of a fortnight. For all that time except for such interludes as the urgent needs of the strike demanded, Sir Isaac devoted himself to the siege. He did all he could to make her realize how restrainedly he used the powers the law vests in a husband, how little he forced upon her the facts of marital authority and wifely duty. At times he sulked, at times he affected a cold dignity, and at times a virile anger swayed him at her unsubmissive silences. He gave her little peace in that struggle, a struggle that came to the edge of physical conflict. There were moments when it seemed to her that nothing remained but that good old-fashioned connubial institution, the tussle for the upper hand, when with a feminine horror she felt violence shouldering her shoulder or contracting ready to grip her wrist. Against violence she doubted her strength, was filled with a desolating sense of yielding nerve and domitable muscle. But just short of violence Sir Isaac’s spirit failed him. He would glower and bluster, half threaten, and retreat. It might come to that at last but at present it had not come to that. She could not understand why she had neither message nor sign from Susan Burnet, but she hid that anxiety and disappointment under her general dignity. She spent as much time with the children as she could, and until Sir Isaac locked up the piano she played, and was surprised to find far more in Chopin than she had ever suspected in the days when she had acquired a passable dexterity of execution. She found, indeed, the most curious things in Chopin, emotional phrases, that stirred and perplexed and yet pleased her....