He decided he would sit down in the armchair and go to sleep.  He crept very carefully to the chair and sat down.  Another interval of listening and he closed his eyes and composed himself for slumber.

He began to think over his plans for the morrow.  He imagined the scene with Madam Gadow, and then his departure to find bachelor lodgings once more.  He debated in what direction he should go to get, suitable lodgings.  Possible difficulties with his luggage, possible annoyances of the search loomed gigantic.  He felt greatly irritated at these minor difficulties.  He wondered if Ethel also was packing.  What particularly would she do?  He listened, but he could hear nothing.  She was very still.  She was really very still!  What could she be doing?  He forgot the bothers of the morrow in this new interest.  Presently he rose very softly and listened.  Then he sat down again impatiently.  He tried to dismiss his curiosity about the silence by recapitulating the story of his wrongs.

He had some difficulty in fixing his mind upon this theme, but presently his memories were flowing freely.  Only it was not wrongs now that he could recall.  He was pestered by an absurd idea that he had again behaved unjustly to Ethel, that he had been headlong and malignant.  He made strenuous efforts to recover his first heat of jealousy—­in vain.  Her remark that she had been as loyal as he, became an obstinate headline in his mind.  Something arose within him that insisted upon Ethel’s possible fate if he should leave her.  What particularly would she do?  He knew how much her character leant upon his, Good Heavens!  What might she not do?

By an effort he succeeded in fixing his mind on Baynes.  That helped him back to the harsher footing.  However hard things might be for her she deserved them.  She deserved them!

Yet presently he slipped again, slipped back to the remorse and regrets of the morning time.  He clutched at Baynes as a drowning man clutches at a rope, and recovered himself.  For a time he meditated on Baynes.  He had never seen the poet, so his imagination had scope.  It appeared to him as an exasperating obstacle to a tragic avenging of his honour that Baynes was a mere boy—­possibly even younger than himself.

The question, “What will become of Ethel?” rose to the surface again.  He struggled against its possibilities.  No!  That was not it!  That was her affair.

He felt inexorably kept to the path he had chosen, for all the waning of his rage.  He had put his hand to the plough.  “If you condone this,” he told himself, “you might condone anything.  There are things one must not stand.”  He tried to keep to that point of view—­assuming for the most part out of his imagination what it was he was not standing.  A dim sense came to him of how much he was assuming.  At any rate she must have flirted!...  He resisted this reviving perception of justice as though it was some unspeakably disgraceful craving.  He tried to imagine her with Baynes.