She dropped her arms; her face twitched.  She looked straight into his eyes and seemed incapable of pronouncing a word.  He frowned at her.

“I—­wish—­it,” he said, tyrannically.  “For your own sake also. . . .”  He meant to carry that point without any pity.  Why didn’t she speak?  He feared passive resistance.  She must. . . .  Make her come.  His frown deepened, and he began to think of some effectual violence, when most unexpectedly she said in a firm voice, “Yes, I can,” and clutched the chair-back again.  He was relieved, and all at once her attitude ceased to interest him.  The important thing was that their life would begin again with an every-day act—­with something that could not be misunderstood, that, thank God, had no moral meaning, no perplexity—­and yet was symbolic of their uninterrupted communion in the past—­in all the future.  That morning, at that table, they had breakfast together; and now they would dine.  It was all over!  What had happened between could be forgotten—­must be forgotten, like things that can only happen once—­death for instance.

“I will wait for you,” he said, going to the door.  He had some difficulty with it, for he did not remember he had turned the key.  He hated that delay, and his checked impatience to be gone out of the room made him feel quite ill as, with the consciousness of her presence behind his back, he fumbled at the lock.  He managed it at last; then in the doorway he glanced over his shoulder to say, “It’s rather late—­you know—­” and saw her standing where he had left her, with a face white as alabaster and perfectly still, like a woman in a trance.

He was afraid she would keep him waiting, but without any breathing time, he hardly knew how, he found himself sitting at table with her.  He had made up his mind to eat, to talk, to be natural.  It seemed to him necessary that deception should begin at home.  The servants must not know—­must not suspect.  This intense desire of secrecy; of secrecy dark, destroying, profound, discreet like a grave, possessed him with the strength of a hallucination—­seemed to spread itself to inanimate objects that had been the daily companions of his life, affected with a taint of enmity every single thing within the faithful walls that would stand forever between the shamelessness of facts and the indignation of mankind.  Even when—­as it happened once or twice—­both the servants left the room together he remained carefully natural, industriously hungry, laboriously at his ease, as though he had wanted to cheat the black oak sideboard, the heavy curtains, the stiff-backed chairs, into the belief of an unstained happiness.  He was mistrustful of his wife’s self-control, unwilling to look at her and reluctant to speak, for it seemed to him inconceivable that she should not betray herself by the slightest movement, by the very first word spoken.  Then he thought the silence in the room was becoming dangerous, and so excessive