For a moment Lewisham was aghast.  Then he perceived he must ignore that argument.

“I would have stood it—­I would have stood anything if you had been loyal—­if I could have been sure of you.  I am a fool, I know, but I would have stood the interruption of my work, the loss of any hope of a Career, if I had been sure you were loyal.  I ...  I cared for you a great deal.”

He stopped.  He had suddenly perceived the pathetic.  He took refuge in anger.

“And you have deceived me!  How long, how much, I don’t care.  You have deceived me.  And I tell you”—­he began to gesticulate—­“I’m not so much your slave and fool as to stand that!  No woman shall make me that sort of fool, whatever else—­So far as I am concerned, this ends things.  This ends things.  We are married—­but I don’t care if we were married five hundred times.  I won’t stop with a woman who takes flowers from another man—­”

“I didn’t,” said Ethel.

Lewisham gave way to a transport of anger.  He caught up a handful of roses and extended them, trembling.  “What’s this?” he asked.  His finger bled from a thorn, as once it had bled from a blackthorn spray.

“I didn’t take them,” said Ethel.  “I couldn’t help it if they were sent.”

“Ugh!” said Lewisham.  “But what is the good of argument and denial?  You took them in, you had them.  You may have been cunning, but you have given yourself away.  And our life and all this”—­he waved an inclusive hand at Madam Gadow’s furniture—­“is at an end.”

He looked at her and repeated with bitter satisfaction, “At an end.”

She glanced at his face, and his expression was remorseless.  “I will not go on living with you,” he said, lest there should be any mistake.  “Our life is at an end.”

Her eyes went from his face to the scattered roses.  She remained staring at these.  She was no longer weeping, and her face, save about the eyes, was white.

He presented it in another form.  “I shall go away.”

“We never ought to have married,” he reflected.  “But ...  I never expected this!”

“I didn’t know,” she cried out, lifting up her voice.  “I didn’t know.  How could I help! Oh!”

She stopped and stared at him with hands clenched, her eyes haggard with despair.

Lewisham remained impenetrably malignant.

“I don’t want to know,” he said, answering her dumb appeal.  “That settles everything. That!” He indicated the scattered flowers.  “What does it matter to me what has happened or hasn’t happened?  Anyhow—­oh!  I don’t mind.  I’m glad.  See?  It settles things.

“The sooner we part the better.  I shan’t stop with you another night.  I shall take my box and my portmanteau into that room and pack.  I shall stop in there to-night, sleep in a chair or think.  And to-morrow I shall settle up with Madam Gadow and go.  You can go back ... to your cheating.”