He straightened himself and stood regarding her.  The basket of roses lay overturned between them.

“You thought these came from someone else?” he said, trying to grasp this inversion of the universe.

She turned her eyes, “I did not know,” she panted.  “A trap....  Was it likely—­they came from you?”

“You thought they came from someone else,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “I did.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Baynes.”

“That boy!”

“Yes—­that boy.”

“Well!”

Lewisham looked about him—­a man in the presence of the inconceivable.

“You mean to say you have been carrying on with that youngster behind my back?” he asked.

She opened her lips to speak and had no words to say.

His pallor increased until every tinge of colour had left his face.  He laughed and then set his teeth.  Husband and wife looked at one another.

“I never dreamt,” he said in even tones.

He sat down on the bed, thrusting his feet among the scattered roses with a sort of grim satisfaction.  “I never dreamt,” he repeated, and the flimsy basket kicked by his swinging foot hopped indignantly through the folding doors into the living room and left a trail of blood-red petals.

They sat for perhaps two minutes, and when he spoke again his voice was hoarse.  He reverted to a former formula.  “Look here,” he said, and cleared his throat.  “I don’t know whether you think I’m going to stand this, but I’m not.”

He looked at her.  She sat staring in front of her, making no attempt to cope with disaster.

“When I say I’m not going to stand it,” explained Lewisham, “I don’t mean having a row or anything of that sort.  One can quarrel and be disappointed over—­other things—­and still go on.  But this is a different thing altogether.

“Of all dreams and illusions!...  Think what I have lost in this accursed marriage.  And now ...  You don’t understand—­you won’t understand.”

“Nor you,” said Ethel, weeping but neither looking at him nor moving her hands from her lap where they lay helplessly. “You don’t understand.”

“I’m beginning to.”

He sat in silence gathering force.  “In one year,” he said, “all my hopes, all my ambitions have gone.  I know I have been cross and irritable—­I know that.  I’ve been pulled two ways.  But ...  I bought you these roses.”

She looked at the roses, and then at his white face, made an imperceptible movement towards him, and became impassive again.

“I do think one thing.  I have found out you are shallow, you don’t think, you can’t feel things that I think and feel.  I have been getting over that.  But I did think you were loyal—­”

“I am loyal,” she cried.

“And you think—­Bah!—­you poke my roses under the table!”

Another portentous silence.  Ethel stirred and he turned his eyes to watch what she was about to do.  She produced her handkerchief and began to wipe her dry eyes rapidly, first one and then the other.  Then she began sobbing.  “I’m ... as loyal as you ... anyhow,” she said.