Unless he asked her that there would be no point in his cross-questioning, and he would have sacrificed his pride without a purpose.  But suddenly, as they stood there face to face, almost touching, she became something immeasurably alien and far off, and the question died on his lips.

“Is that all?” she asked with a slight smile.

“Yes; you’d better go and dress,” he said, and turned back to his room.

XVI

The turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.

Ralph Marvell, pondering upon this, reflected that for him the sign had been set, more than three years earlier, in an Italian ilex-grove.  That day his life had brimmed over—­so he had put it at the time.  He saw now that it had brimmed over indeed:  brimmed to the extent of leaving the cup empty, or at least of uncovering the dregs beneath the nectar.  He knew now that he should never hereafter look at his wife’s hand without remembering something he had read in it that day.  Its surface-language had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he had seen the warning letters.

Since then he had been walking with a ghost:  the miserable ghost of his illusion.  Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need—­as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead.  All this came to him with aching distinctness the morning after his talk with his wife on the stairs.  He had accused himself, in midnight retrospect, of having failed to press home his conclusion because he dared not face the truth.  But he knew this was not the case.  It was not the truth he feared, it was another lie.  If he had foreseen a chance of her saying:  “Yes, I was with Peter Van Degen, and for the reason you think,” he would have put it to the touch, stood up to the blow like a man; but he knew she would never say that.  She would go on eluding and doubling, watching him as he watched her; and at that game she was sure to beat him in the end.

On their way home from the Elling dinner this certainty had become so insufferable that it nearly escaped him in the cry:  “You needn’t watch me—­I shall never again watch you!” But he had held his peace, knowing she would not understand.  How little, indeed, she ever understood, had been made clear to him when, the same night, he had followed her upstairs through the sleeping house.  She had gone on ahead while he stayed below to lock doors and put out lights, and he had supposed her to be already in her room when he reached the upper landing; but she stood there waiting in the spot where he had waited for her a few hours earlier.  She had shone her vividest at dinner, with revolving brilliancy that collective approval always struck from her; and the glow of it still hung on her as she paused there in the dimness, her shining cloak dropped from her white shoulders.