A few days after, she was quite well enough to get up, the doctor told her to do so in the morning, but after looking out into the day she lay down again. She was not quite ready for life yet; here, in her bed, she was more or less aloof from it, but after a few hours restless thinking, getting up, and lunch, came to be a distinct relief.

Directly after lunch she went out for a drive, and when she returned, and had got into her tea-gown, she went down to her boudoir and threw herself on the sofa with a weary little laugh.

“Why can’t I rest or sew? why won’t my body get as tired as my brain? I could move a hundredweight this minute.”

She got up and moved, with hardly any exertion, a great cabinet that would have tried the strength of a fair-sized man.

“Humphrey declared I couldn’t,” she said, laughing again. “Gru! I can’t sit here and think. I wonder where is Humphrey—I believe I should like to ride a race, or to spend an hour on a switchback railway!”

She went down and wandered from room to room with her long strong movements, every one of them the very incarnation of healthy grace.

At last she found herself at the door of Strange’s den. With a sudden wilful impulse she opened the door and went in. Every window was open, and the soft cool air was playing high jinks among the curtains.

Strange had brought his collection of odds and ends from his chambers, and had scattered them through the big alcoved room in a sort of orderly disorder. The floor was stained and spread with an amazing collection of skins. In his divings into studios he had learnt the comfort and use of screens; there were several in the room, kept well out of the way of knees and shoulders.

Thanks to the draught the cigar smoke had lost its heaviness, and was floating as a sort of spiritual essence through the textures.

For some minutes after Gwen came in she could hardly discern it at all, when she did she wished she could transport it to her part of the house, it struck her as being a purer scent than one gets in women’s rooms.

“How hospitable those chairs look!” she said, feeling one. “Does he lose all his right hand gloves, I wonder! Do all men? As a matter of fact I know amazingly little of men or of their ways! This is a clean, self-respecting room, I like it, I wonder I never took any notice of it before! Ah, another screen!”

She moved it aside and found an alcove where an easel stood, and on this a picture hidden by a drapery of primrose and chestnut silk.

“The way that drapery falls is quite different from anything else,” said Gwen stepping back a pace or two, “why won’t my tea-gowns go like that!”

Something suggested to her just then to pry no further, but she swept the suggestion aside with the draperies, and saw before her her own painted image. For one minute she felt inclined to rip the canvas from end to end, and to kill once and for all the vague look of motherhood in the woman’s eyes.

“This wretch!” she muttered at last, “so she’s in the house! As if I hadn’t enough to handicap me without her.”

She turned away with a look of loathing and jealous hatred, and sat down.

After a little she got up slowly and turned to leave the room, then almost in spite of herself she went back to the picture and began again her angry eager inspection of it.

As she stood with her head thrown back and her hands clenched involuntarily, her husband came in. He did not see her for a minute; when he did, he stopped, and watched her.

It was a revelation and a shock to see her in this abandonment of jealous anger. He rustled a book on the table to arouse her and quoted, laughing:

She moved quickly aside into the shade.

“When did this come?” she asked, in a low constrained voice.

“Brydon sent it a few days ago. You are better?”

“I am quite well, thank you.”

“The doctor thinks directly you can travel we had better go into the country.”

She flung a swift furtive look at him. “How much does he know, I wonder?”

“Won’t you sit down?” he asked, putting a soft low chair within her reach, “and may I smoke?”

She bent her head without speaking, and he saw that her hands were moving restlessly.

He lit his cigar in a leisurely fashion, then he drew up a chair and sat down near her and began to smoke.

After a time he set to wonder how long this remarkable vigil was going to hold out. He was determined to keep silence till his wife spoke; he saw she was fighting in her dumb concentrated way for expression; he felt certain some sort of an avalanche was about to descend upon him, and he preferred she should set it sliding herself. Perhaps the girl had had too much lonely struggle and her brain as well as her body had weakened with it, at any rate the first thought she felt herself producing audibly was,

“I wish almost you were a fool, Humphrey!”

He took his cigar out of his mouth. “Indeed, why?”

“Because then,” she said, rather desperately, “I shouldn’t feel so altogether like one myself!”

She stood suddenly up and looked down at him.

“Look here,” she said, “you are better in every point than I am, you are better in brain, you are stronger, you have seen more, you know more, you are better all round. If you were a fool you see, I could despise you; if even you had once made yourself ridiculous in my eyes or had demeaned yourself, what I have to say would come easy.”

“Come to the point at once, Gwen,” he said. “What is it?”

She took no notice of his remark but went to the picture and drew the coverings over the face.

“What has the doctor told you?”

“The doctor has told me nothing definite.”

She turned away to hide her hot face.

“You know perfectly well,” she said in a low voice, “that I shall be the mother of a child of yours in some months.”

“Yes,” he said gently.

“But you do not know,” she went on, “you do not know that this is such a shame to me, such a deathly burning shame, that I hate the light, I hate the eyes of any human creature on me, I would like to fly in the night to some desert place, and hide myself.”

“Are you mad, Gwen?”

“No, I am sane, as sane as on the day I sold myself to you for an experiment. Can you not see, Humphrey, that I am as shameful, I, your wife, as any one of those women you told me of, not one of whom you loved—loved?” she added, with an involuntary raising of her head.

“I am no nearer to you now,” she went on, “than I was that day, not a jot nearer, and yet I am going to be the mother of your child! Are you dense, Humphrey, or is it because you are a man and are grown used to chattels, that you cannot see the depth of my shame and humiliation, and the reasons for it?”

She faltered and swayed slightly.

“Sit down, Gwen, sit down at once.”

He drew up the chair to her. “The situation seems a curious one,” he said at last, “this outbreak seems to be the climax to a long course of morbid thinking.”

“You cannot understand,” she said faintly.

“I confess I cannot, altogether. When you married me you were no ignorant girl—”

“Humphrey,” she cried, her eyes absolutely burning on him, “I did not think that I should have to defend myself to you in this! I thought you would know the absolute ignorance of girls. It is no veiled ignorance, it is absolute, or else a mere vague—”

“Dear, it was a cowardly and an unjust reproach. However, things have now come to a head with us, it is no use delaying, you want, I gather, a separation?”

She started.

“I thought I would like to go home for a time—alone.”

For a minute Strange considered. “This is no time for softness or entreaty,” was the result of his reflections.

“We need have no legal separation, Gwen—as yet,” he added, with slow emphasis.

She trembled from head to foot, he saw it but went on calmly.

“You are not strong enough now for any trouble of that sort, but later on, of course, some arrangement must be come to. By the way, what will your father and mother say of this?”

“They will not say anything,” she said bitterly, “they will silently wonder together in the library.”

“And Dacre—”

“Dacre is a fool.”

“The world?” he asked.

He felt quite interested in the answer, the shock was beginning to freeze the pith in him.

“I don’t think the world will speak of me, I have no quality it can seize on for gossip. No gossip has any savour unless it deals with sexual relations and until now I thought I was absolutely sexless,” she said slowly, looking blankly out into space.

Her face was awful, her husband turned away from it.

“Gwen, Gwen,” he said at last, coming back to her, “do you understand what you are doing?”

“I do,” she said heavily, “I cannot bear this shame in your presence, I should lie down and die under it. Can you think I do this lightly, can you not understand the awfulness of speaking such things aloud?”

“I understand it all, dear, but have you counted the cost, you will be weak and ill, perhaps in danger, can you bear it all? If you finally decide to go alone to your home I will start the same day for Africa. I have been asked to undertake that expedition for the relief of Broad, my old friend, the missionary I told you about. I do not intend to treat this resolve of yours as a freak, Gwen, or to give it the grace of one. You are a strong woman and from your own point of view, sane. Once again, have you counted the cost?”

“I have lived virtually alone all my life,” she said, “I think I can bear sickness and pain alone. Humphrey, Humphrey, let me make one excuse for myself? I did not know what marriage was when I tried my experiment.”

He looked down on her upturned face with a great tenderness.

“I don’t blame you, dear. You are sinning terribly, but you know not what you do. Your sin is unnatural, for it is against yourself, you have let a morbid spot in you grow sick to rottenness, and as time goes on, child, you will suffer as few women know how to suffer, you are sinning ignorantly, and your punishment will come, but from another hand than mine. But there is one thing I will speak of,” he said, with grave sternness, “see that you are not ashamed of your motherhood. Forget, if you like, that the child is in part mine, do not forget that it is wholly yours, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, beware, at least, of sinning knowingly. You have had a warning, Gwen, in this, profit by it, don’t let this child grow up without knowing the everyday uses of a mother. Don’t let any other human creature suffer in this as you have suffered.”

Gwen listened to him with bent head, and every word dropped into her soul like molten lead.

There was an awful resistless finality in every word of his, in every tone. He had to stoop to catch her answer, and her face was almost livid.

“I will try and be a good mother, I have no wish to fail in every relation of life.”

“Don’t move until I return,” said her husband.

He went into the dining-room and brought back some wine. She turned on him a look of dumb protest, but she drank it. “And now, come to this sofa and lie down.”

She obeyed him as if she were in a dream, wishing with vague pain that he would touch her, even if it were only once.

After a few minutes she turned from the light to shut out his face. He heard her, and drew down the blind softly; he seemed to her all-hearing as well as all-seeing.

“Oh, if only he were a fool!” she cried to herself, “I might endure it.”

The room was cool and still, and the lowered blinds flapping lazily in the breeze were like a lullaby. Gwen was worn out body and mind, and as she lay in the coolness, her hurt heart stopped writhing, her poor foolish shame ceased to burn, her fingers relaxed softly and forgot to clench themselves, and at last she fell asleep like a tired child.

Her husband went softly to the sofa, she started slightly, and a twist of pain came into her brow. He smiled grimly.

“Even in her sleep,” he muttered, “and I am ready to swear that all the time it is only an idea. And now this child—the best shot in my locker, seems about to run an awful mucker in the business. Ah, Gwen, if you only knew what you cast from you in your splendid way!—Ah well, there’s one satisfaction, if you’re not mine, my Gwen, you’re no man’s. Ah, my poor Gwen, my darling, God keep you!”

He stooped down over her and for a minute or two let her breath come and go on his cheek, then he stood up and went to his writing-table, and let his face fall heavily into his hands.

When he looked up at last at a slight soft rustle of silk, there had gone out of it for ever the look of cool buoyant youth, which was its distinguishing characteristic.

When Gwen awoke the blinds were up and it was dusk, and the tea had just been brought in.

“Three hours at the very least,” she thought with much discomfort, as she sipped her tea, “and watched by him the whole time!”

When she had finished her tea she was rising to leave the room.

Her husband stopped her.

“Will you please sit down again for a few minutes?”

“The dressing bell has gone,” she said unwillingly.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said, “we can be late for once. I fancy,” he went on coolly, “that your pride is of a sufficiently rational and well-bred order not to think itself obliged to make any difficulties about money matters.”

“I will do as you wish in the matter.”

“And if any emergency arises requiring your interference, will you consent to act?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“And now,” he said, “comes the question of how this business is to be presented to the world.”

She raised her head impatiently. “The world won’t trouble itself with me.”

“You’ll escape better than most women, but you won’t get off scot-free, you are a woman and the world is the world. I will make the matter right at the Clubs; you want to go to your mother for a short time, and I wish to go to Africa where delays are apt to occur, and I have a convenient reputation for vagabondage. If I were you I would immediately inform every woman of your acquaintance of our arrangement in a candid spirit of information. And, Gwen, as the most awful misfortune that ever befell a child is to be cast on the world without a mother, see that your care for this mother’s health, and when the time of peril comes for her life, is as great as mine would be.”

“I shall not betray your trust in any way,” she said quietly.

“I shall not trouble you to write, I shall find other means of hearing of you. But even if you are dying, Gwen, and I know it, I shall not come to you unless you distinctly and in your right mind ask me to do so; then, dear, I shall come; otherwise, and later on, we can make definite arrangements. Good-bye, Gwen, good-bye, dear.”

He went to the door and held it open to let her pass.

She paused and turned her two sad eyes on him.

“Go, child,” he said gently, “go quickly.”

When she had gone he locked the door and fell on the sofa, still warm from her sleeping body, and fought down his agony in decent silence. Then he washed and dressed, and went down to his dinner.