His suit-case he left as a prey to his lady of the situation now ended; and walking to the nearest station, five miles away, waited there rather miserably for a midnight train which brought him back in the small hours to the virtuous side of his astonished Caroline. He had a good deal to explain, including the absence of his suit-case; which forced him to say things which were not all of them true. And when next day the suit-case arrived ‘forwarded by request,’ addressed on an hotel label to the name left in the visitors’ book, there was a good deal more to explain; and for the first time Caroline became jealous. But it did not make her more interesting; it took the depressing form of a tearful resignation to the inevitable. She supposed that he had become tired of her, which was true; she added, less truthfully, that it was what she had always foreseen would happen, when as a matter of fact her mind had never been sufficiently awake to foresee anything so undomestic as suspicious circumstances pointing toward divorce. Being simple, she spent the rest of the day trimming herself a new hat; at 6 p.m. she fortified herself in maternity by giving the three children a hot bath before bed-time; and then, as it was the servant’s evening out, she descended to the kitchen and made pancakes for Mr. Trimblerigg’s supper; and sat to watch him eat them with her hair unbecomingly tied up in a large pink bow. These mild symptoms of jealousy expending itself in domestic steam, ought to have interested him but did not. He merely recognized and accepted the fact that Caroline’s jealousy was as unimportant as had been her previous lack of it. Perhaps his mind was too preoccupied to give it all the attention it deserved. He was amazed by the return of the suit-case under a name not of his own choosing; and yet somehow it raised the lady in his respect. For he had in him a touch of the sportsman; and on being struck so shrewd a blow, was quick to recognize that in going out into the night without warning he had left behind him a situation difficult for the lady to explain. He wondered how she had explained it, and was a little fretted because he could not quite make things fit. All he saw clearly was that the open forwarding of the suit-case by rail to name and address, gave to it an air of _bona fide_ which might have served to allay suspicion. But unless it was to avenge herself why had she given the right address? Was it, he wondered, an unusual combination of vindictiveness with plain horse common sense; a straight one in the eye for him, and a bit of smart dodging for herself? If so, she was more interesting than he had thought: that was just the sort of thing that Isabel Sparling would have done. In that direction he was beginning to have definite regrets. So, after the pancakes, he sat and thought, while his wife, a mellow picture of domesticity, bent under the lamplight darning his socks.