And after dinner, with a lamp beside the open window, he read aloud from _ The Times_ the evening post had brought, such fragments as he thought might interest her.  The custom was invariable, except on Sundays, when, to please his wife, he dozed over Tennyson or Farrar as their mood might be.  She knitted while he read, asked gentle questions, told him his voice was a “lovely reading voice,” and enjoyed the little discussions that occasions prompted because he always let her with them with “Ah, Sophia, I had never thought of it quite in that way before; but now you mention it I must say I think there’s something in it....”

For David Bittacy was wise.  It was long after marriage, during his months of loneliness spent with trees and forests in India, his wife waiting at home in the Bungalow, that his other, deeper side had developed the strange passion that she could not understand.  And after one or two serious attempts to let her share it with him, he had given up and learned to hide it from her.  He learned, that is, to speak of it only casually, for since she knew it was there, to keep silence altogether would only increase her pain.  So from time to time he skimmed the surface just to let her show him where he was wrong and think she won the day.  It remained a debatable land of compromise.  He listened with patience to her criticisms, her excursions and alarms, knowing that while it gave her satisfaction, it could not change himself.  The thing lay in him too deep and true for change.  But, for peace’ sake, some meeting-place was desirable, and he found it thus.

It was her one fault in his eyes, this religious mania carried over from her upbringing, and it did no serious harm.  Great emotion could shake it sometimes out of her.  She clung to it because her father taught it her and not because she had thought it out for herself.  Indeed, like many women, she never really thought at all, but merely reflected the images of others’ thinking which she had learned to see.  So, wise in his knowledge of human nature, old David Bittacy accepted the pain of being obliged to keep a portion of his inner life shut off from the woman he deeply loved.  He regarded her little biblical phrases as oddities that still clung to a rather fine, big soul—­like horns and little useless things some animals have not yet lost in the course of evolution while they have outgrown their use.

“My dear, what is it?  You frightened me!” She asked it suddenly, sitting up so abruptly that her cap dropped sideways almost to her ear.  For David Bittacy behind his crackling paper had uttered a sharp exclamation of surprise.  He had lowered the sheet and was staring at her over the tops of his gold glasses.

“Listen to this, if you please,” he said, a note of eagerness in his voice, “listen to this, my dear Sophia.  It’s from an address by Francis Darwin before the Royal Society.  He is president, you know, and son of the great Darwin.  Listen carefully, I beg you.  It is most significant.”