They sprang apart. They could not be certain that he had seen them. Each was sure that their arms had loosed the moment when the handle of the door had rattled. Each communicated this certainty to the other in one glance. Each turned toward the husband.

Stainton smiled heartily.

"Didn't expect me so soon?" he asked. He went to his wife and kissed her. "Hello, Captain," he said, shaking the Austrian's cold hand. "I see you have been good enough to come and cheer up Muriel as I asked you. But, by Jove, you are rather a late stayer, aren't you? A custom of your country, perhaps? Oh, no offence. I'm glad you are here."

"When——" began Muriel.

"I got as far as MontÉlimart when they caught me with one of their blue telegrams, calmly postponing the meeting until next week. They will have to pay for that postponement, Captain. Lucky thing I wired them what train I was coming by, or I should have gone the last ninety-odd miles and landed at Lyons before I heard that—I wasn't wanted."

Von Klausen had keyed himself for heroics; Muriel had been on the verge of fainting; but Stainton's tone reassured them both. The Austrian, nevertheless, made for the door: to face disaster was one thing; to court it quite another.

"I have indeed remained late," he said. "I hope that I have not bored your good wife."

"Oh," answered Stainton, patting Muriel's pale cheek, "I am sure that my good wife has been entertained. Haven't you, dear?"

Muriel opened her lips. She stammered, but she managed at last distinctly to say:

"Captain von Klausen has been very kind."

"I thank you," said von Klausen, with his Continental bow.

"What's your hurry?" persisted Jim.

"You have said, sir, that it is late."

"Not so late that you can't stop a few minutes more."

The Captain thought otherwise. He really must go.

Stainton saw him to the front door, and then returned to the drawing-room, where his wife stood just on the spot where he had left her.

"Now," said the husband, quietly. "I think that it is time we had an explanation."

She swayed a little, and he came forward to catch her; but at his approach she flew into a storm of hot anger.

"Don't touch me!" she cried.

She had found herself at last. What she had been she looked at squarely, what she was she would be entire. Stainton, in his habitual rÔle of fond protector, was a figure that she could feel gently towards, could even pity; but Stainton as an accusing husband she now realised that she could not but hate. She looked at him with a scorn that was not lessened by the fact that, goading it from a deep recess in her heart, there cringed an imp of fear. She knew that she hated him.

Jim stopped short.

"Don't touch me!" she repeated. "You believe I've deceived you. Well, you never meant to go to Lyons. You have tricked me. You have lied to me!"

Tradition always shows us the wronged husband in a towering rage, in the throes of consuming indignation. Truth, however, with no respect for either man or his traditions, occasionally assigns to the deceiving wife the part of condemner. Constant though truth is, men are the slaves of their traditions, and when they meet truth, and tradition is contradicted, they are confused. In spite of the evidences of his senses, it did not for that moment so much as occur to Stainton to pursue the part of judge. Instead, he pulled a chair a little nearer to her.

"Won't you sit down?" he asked.

Muriel sat down.

"Well," she demanded, "what have you to say for yourself?"

"About my trip to Lyons?"

"About this spying on me, about this surprising me in my own house."

"I have some right, I think, to come home."

"You meant to trap me. You would never have dared to talk about an 'explanation' while the Captain was here to defend me!"

"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has been in my mind for some time."

"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at the first?"

"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"

"Love affair? There has been no love affair."

Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.

"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"

Muriel was silent.

"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the Spanish dancer——"

Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved, with an upward motion, slowly around her.

"You saw that!"

"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and, naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe what it was."

The wife fought for her self-control and won it.

"Deceit! Deceit even then!"

"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris—and I understood later why you wanted to go back."

He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.

"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy, too, there came the night of the fÊte. I could tell when von Klausen and you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the boulevards: I separated myself from you."

He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.

"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted to give me a fair chance? You threw me into his arms—or tried to—and you call that a fair chance?"

Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he smiled quietly.

"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger; your love for me—or failing your love, your moral strength—need not assert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."

"You coward!"

"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full opportunity. Otherwise the fear—a very small one then—would have continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives, his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."

"You dare to say that!"

He was returning to the attitude of mind in which he had entered the room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing its point.

"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went on, "a woman compromises herself with X, at least after she has become a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only exterior circumstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."

Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a lightning-flash on a darkened sea.

"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she declared.

He raised a steady hand.

"Only a moment more, please," he said.

Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:

"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I took you away from Paris again—the next day, wasn't it?—because you wanted to go, but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian turned up here in Marseilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I decided to make an end of it. Now"—he spoke as if he were concluding an affair of business—"I have made that end."

"How have you made that end?"

Stainton smiled wanly.

"My dear——" he said.

"Don't call me that."

"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."

"How have you made an end?"

"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."

"You mean that you think—that you dare to think that I—that the Captain and—that we——"

"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know. Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the preliminary circumstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this house——"

"At your invitation!"

"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained alone with you in this room until after midnight—I say, given all these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I wanted—the evidence of seeing you in his arms—no man in his senses would for one moment doubt——"

"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.

"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say——"

"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You unclean-minded old man!"

He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.

At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been so long festering in her mind—at first unguessed, then vehemently denied, but always there and always becoming more and more poisonous—the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had achieved maturity.

"Now you listen to me," she commanded.

Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.

Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself. He gripped its back and leaned across the back toward her.

So they stood, facing each other.

"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to hope—actually to hope!—for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young, and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one minute your wife."

Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.

"You were a good imitation," he said.

"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife, anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real, so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house, and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"

"For a time you were a good imitation."

"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things would change, that they were so bad they must change—and they wouldn't."

"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper lip.

"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't you remember, at the very start, how I said I wanted to be honest? But somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened, seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie, and so all we did was lies and lies."

"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."

"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to give—not what I gave you—not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you always knew that you had all you wanted. Well, you had. But did you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I sinned against Nature. I let myself be married to a man three times my age—and this is Nature's punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger, and because I was hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"—she flashed it out at him—"what happened to me while you were selling the mine was not an accident!"

This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger and horror struggled for him.

"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean——"

"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go crazy—crazy! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother against my will!"

He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her deed. He could not try to indicate the injury that she had most likely done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:

"You loved him—then?"

"I didn't love you."

"Did you love him?"

"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But then, when I did that thing, I only knew what I've told you."

Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself, but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the door.

Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.

"But I love him now," she said.

"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.

"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing—nothing. I was no more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so little, were fit to be my husband."

Stainton half turned.

"And he?" Jim asked.

"He loves me: you only liked having me."

He turned slowly away again.

She thought that she heard him whisper:

"No child!"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a baby, a little dead baby. It will never leave me: it's the little ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."

He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face. One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with him. She was right; he was growing old.