“You said you knew why I went away; I want to tell you why I came back.”

“No! no!” she exclaimed.  “It could be of no use—­of no help to either of us.”

“I came back,” he went on, ignoring her interruption, “merely to ask you one question.  Will you hear it and answer it?  I can wait,” he added, as she kept silence.

“Then, to-morrow, as soon as possible,” Mrs. Branscome replied, beaten by his persistency.  “Come at seven; we dine at eight, so I can give you half-an-hour.  But you are ungenerous.”

That night began what may be termed the crisis of Hilton’s education.  This was the second time he had caught Mrs. Branscome unawares.  On the first occasion—­that of his unexpected arrival in England—­he did not possess the experience to measure accurately looks and movements, or to comprehend them as the connotation of words.  It is doubtful, besides, whether, had he owned the skill, he would have had the power to exercise it, so engrossed was he in his own distress.  By the process, however, of continually repressing the visible signs of his own emotions, he had now learnt to appreciate them in others.  And in Mrs. Branscome’s sudden change of colour, in little convulsive movements of her hands, and in a certain droop of eyelids veiling eyes which met the gaze frankly as a rule, he read this evening sure proofs of the constancy of her heart.  This fresh knowledge affected him in two ways.  On the one hand it gave breath to the selfish passion which now dominated his ideas.  At the same time, however it assured him that when he asked his question:  “Why did you not send for me?” an unassailable answer would be forthcoming; and, moreover, by convincing him of this, it destroyed the sole excuse he had pleaded to himself for claiming the right to ask it.  In self-defence Hilton had recourse to his old outcry against the marriage laws and, finding this barren, came in the end to frankly devising schemes for their circumvention.  Such inward personal conflicts were, of necessity, strange to a man dry-nursed on abstractions, and, after a night of tension, they tossed him up on the shores of the morning broken in mind and irresolute for good or ill.

* * * * *

Mrs. Branscome received him impassively at the appointed time.  David saw that he was expected to speak to the point, and a growing scorn for his own insistence urged him to the same course.  He plunged abruptly into his subject and his manner showed him in the rough, more particularly to himself.

“What I came back to ask you is just this.  You know—­you must know—­that I would have come, whatever the consequence.  Why did you not send for me after, after—?”

“Why did I not send for you?” Mrs. Branscome took him up, repeating his words mechanically, as though their meaning had not reached her.  “You don’t mean that you never received my letter.  Oh, don’t say that!  It can’t have miscarried, I registered it.”