She heard her husband walk through the house once after that.  When dinner was served, he was not there.  It was eleven o’clock by the time-piece on her mantel when she heard him come in, but he did not come to their room.  He went quietly into the guest chamber across the hall.

She waited through a leaden period.  Then, moved by an impulse she did not attempt to define, a mixture of motives, pity for him, a craving for the outlet of words, a desire to set herself right before him, she slipped on a dressing robe and crossed the hall.  The door swung open noiselessly.  Fyfe sat slumped in a chair, hat pulled low on his forehead, hands thrust deep in his pockets.  He did not even look up.  His eyes stared straight ahead, absent, unseeingly fixed on nothing.  He seemed to be unconscious of her presence or to ignore it,—­she could not tell which.

“Jack,” she said.  And when he made no response she said again, tremulously, that unyielding silence chilling her, “Jack.”

He stirred a little, but only to take off his hat and lay it on a table beside him.  With one hand pushing back mechanically the straight, reddish-tinged hair from his brow, he looked up at her and said briefly, in a tone barren of all emotion: 

“Well?”

She was suddenly dumb.  Words failed her utterly.  Yet there was much to be said, much that was needful to say.  They could not go on with a cloud like that over them, a cloud that had to be dissipated in the crucible of words.  Yet she could not begin.  Fyfe, after a prolonged silence, seemed to grasp her difficulty.  Abruptly he began to speak, cutting straight to the heart of his subject, after his fashion.

“It’s a pity things had to take his particular turn,” said he.  “But now that you’re face to face with something definite, what do you propose to do about it?”

“Nothing,” she answered slowly.  “I can’t help the feeling.  It’s there.  But I can thrust it into the background, go on as if it didn’t exist.  There’s nothing else for me to do, that I can see.  I’m sorry, Jack.”

“So am I,” he said grimly.  “Still, it was a chance we took,—­or I took, rather.  I seem to have made a mistake or two, in my estimate of both you and myself.  That is human enough, I suppose.  You’re making a bigger mistake than I did though, to let Monohan sweep you off your feet.”

There was something that she read for contempt in his tone.  It stung her.

“He hasn’t swept me off my feet, as you put it,” she cried.  “Good Heavens, do you think I’m that spineless sort of creature?  I’ve never forgotten I’m your wife.  I’ve got a little self-respect left yet, if I was weak enough to grasp at the straw you threw me in the beginning.  I was honest with you then.  I’m trying to be honest with you now.”