“You ask me if I am sorry--I, who have lived through a hell of boredom for eight years so as not to hurt Ralph’s feelings, not to break his heart! And now at last it’s broken. Yes, I am sorry. Frightfully sorry. And I am also glad--I feel as though I myself had died and that my soul had been freed from a long imprisonment. That is what I felt, as though it was I who was dead, when I saw him----” He gaped at her idiotically. “For Heaven’s sake, don’t stare in that idiotic way, Hugo! I’ve already had more than I can bear to-night, sitting here and thinking and thinking of poor Ralph downstairs and wondering what final thought it must have been that made him do it----” Hugo Carr couldn’t understand. “But when--how?” Had not she warned him that she had already had more than she could bear? And now her nerves rose up to meet his gaping stare. “That is why I looked so frightened when you came in--I didn’t expect you, I didn’t know who it could be, and I was afraid. And that is why I was relieved when you said you had told Smith to go into the study in an hour’s time--because that would give me time to think, to realise the thing, and to tell you. Didn’t I say that I had something important to tell you before--before Ralph came in? I was going to tell you that Ralph would never come in, for I had seen him when I went downstairs to fetch a book----” “You were reading when I came in!” he accused her queerly. “Oh, dear, you are like a man out of every book that was ever written by men about women! I was pretending to read. And then you told me you had come to see Ralph on a point of honour! At last you had summoned up your courage to see Ralph--on a point of honour. And that’s why I wanted you to be silent for a while, for speech sometimes makes a tragedy unbearably idiotic. I wanted peace, Hugo! I wanted just to taste the peace between the old life and the new, the old life in which there was no honour and the new life in which there will anyway be happiness....” And she touched him, but with a blind gesture of his arm he swept her aside, and strode out of the room. She stared, wide-eyed, unrealising, at the panels of the door; she took two quick steps towards the door, she stopped, and then she ran madly to it and opened it and called, “Hugo, Hugo!” But, even as she cried his name, the door below slammed massively, like a knell from the bowels of the earth; and through the windows of the room behind her came the noise of swift footsteps striding away.... She went back into the room. Still she could not realise. She paced about the room, here, there, trying to think, trying not to think, wishing to give way to the intolerable moment, unable to give way. The candles danced furiously in the gentle draught, for she had left the door wide open. She was but a shadow among a furious company of shadows--when, as she was by the windows, she saw one more in the open doorway. She screamed behind her teeth.