It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind.  She had absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives.  It had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her.  And upon his interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a year.  She was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled her during their first settlement in London.  She wanted a joint life in the social world of London, she demanded his presence, his attention, the daily practical evidences of love.  It was all very well for him to be away when the child was coming, but now everything was different.  Now he must stay by her.

This time he argued no case.  These issues he had settled for ever.  Even an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him.  Behind these things now was India.  The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold upon his imagination.  He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that picture by a vision of the east. . . .

He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington.  The young man displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental.  But he seemed to have something on his mind.  And Amanda said not a word about him.  He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt. . . .

And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these two larger carnivores began to change.  Except for the repetition of accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of the word.  They dealt chiefly with the “Cub,” and even there Benham felt presently that the enthusiasm diminished.  A new amazing quality for Amanda appeared—­triteness.  The very writing of her letters changed as though it had suddenly lost backbone.  Her habitual liveliness of phrasing lost its point.  Had she lost her animation?  Was she ill unknowingly?  Where had the light gone?  It was as if her attention was distracted. . . .  As if every day when she wrote her mind was busy about something else.

Abruptly at last he understood.  A fact that had never been stated, never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question perceived to be there. . . .

He left a record of that moment of realization.

“Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had never seen Amanda before.  Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a scientific distinctness that has neither light nor shadow. . . .

“Of course,” I said, and then presently I got up very softly. . . .