It was instantly as if he had been aware of that all the time.

Once he had made that step, he moved swiftly.  Not a hundred paces before the struggle was over, and he had plunged headlong into the blue abyss of remorse.  And all these things that had been so dramatic and forcible, all the vivid brutal things he had said, stood no longer graven inscriptions but in letters of accusing flame.  He tried to imagine he had not said them, that his memory played him a trick; tried to suppose he had said something similar perhaps, but much less forcible.  He attempted with almost equal futility to minimise his own wounds.  His endeavour served only to measure the magnitude of his fall.

He had recovered everything now, he saw it all.  He recalled Ethel, sunlit in the avenue, Ethel, white in the moonlight before they parted outside the Frobisher house, Ethel as she would come out of Lagune’s house greeting him for their nightly walk, Ethel new wedded, as she came to him through the folding doors radiant in the splendour his emotions threw about her.  And at last, Ethel angry, dishevelled and tear-stained in that ill-lit, untidy little room.  All to the cadence of a hurdy-gurdy tune!  From that to this!  How had it been possible to get from such an opalescent dawning to such a dismal day?  What was it had gone?  He and she were the same two persons who walked so brightly in his awakened memory; he and she who had lived so bitterly through the last few weeks of misery!

His mood sank for a space to the quality of groaning.  He implicated her now at most as his partner in their failure—­“What a mess we have made of things!” was his new motif.  “What a mess!”

He knew love now for what it was, knew it for something more ancient and more imperative than reason.  He knew now that he loved her, and his recent rage, his hostility, his condemnation of her seemed to him the reign of some exterior influence in his mind.  He thought incredulously of the long decline in tenderness that had followed the first days of their delight in each other, the diminution of endearment, the first yielding to irritability, the evenings he had spent doggedly working, resisting all his sense of her presence.  “One cannot always be love-making,” he had said, and so they were slipping apart.  Then in countless little things he had not been patient, he had not been fair.  He had wounded her by harshness, by unsympathetic criticism, above all by his absurd secrecy about Miss Heydinger’s letters.  Why on earth had he kept those letters from her? as though there was something to hide!  What was there to hide?  What possible antagonism could there be?  Yet it was by such little things that their love was now like some once valued possession that had been in brutal hands, it was scratched and chipped and tarnished, it was on its way to being altogether destroyed.  Her manner had changed towards him, a gulf was opening that he might never be able to close again.