He struck another match and held it head downwards. “You needn’t hurry a feller.” He tapped his cigarette gently on his knee, and applied the flame to it. “That’s better.” Lady Holme moved violently on the sofa. She had a pricking sensation all over her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever. A ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could Fritz suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at once as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that sort of man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle brute. He blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now with a sort of sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them fade away in the brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt another manner, more in accord with her condition of tense nervousness. “When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to do it,” she said sharply. “You’re forgetting what’s due to me--to any woman.” “Don’t fuss at this time of night.” “I want to go to bed, but I’m not going till I know the house is properly shut up. Please go at once and see.” “I never knew you were such a coward,” he rejoined without stirring. “Who was at the opera?” “I won’t talk to you till you do what I ask.” “That’s a staggerin’ blow.” She sprang up with an exclamation of anger. Her nerves were on edge and she felt inclined to scream out. “I never thought you could be so--such a cad to a woman, Fritz,” she said. She moved towards the door. As she did so she heard a cab in the square outside, a rattle of wheels, then silence. It had stopped. Her heart seemed to stand still too. She knew now that she was a coward, though not in the way Fritz meant. She was a coward with regard to him. Her jealousy had prompted her to do a mad thing. In doing it she had actually meant to produce a violent scene. It had seemed to her that such a scene would relieve the tension of her nerves, of her heart, would clear the air. But now that the scene seemed imminent--if Fritz had forgotten, and she was certain he had forgotten, to lock the door--she felt heart and nerves were failing her. She felt that she had risked too much, far too much. With almost incredible swiftness she remembered her imprudence in speaking to Carey at Arkell House and how it had only served to put a weapon into her husband’s hand, a weapon he had not scrupled to use in his selfish way to further his own pleasure and her distress. That stupid failure had not sufficiently warned her, and now she was on the edge of some greater disaster. She was positive that Leo Ulford was in the cab which had just stopped, and it was too late now to prevent him from entering the house. Lord Holme had got up from his chair and stood facing her. He looked quite pleasant. She thought of the change that would come into his face in a moment and turned cold.