These thoughts, after a momentary respite, held him in their grip as he walked London streets.  Suspicion of the past—­ugly and venomous—­flapped its black wings about him.  Had Rachel ever been faithful to him—­even in the early days?  She had made acquaintance with the Tanners very soon after their marriage.  Looking back, a number of small incidents and scenes poked their heads out of the dead level of the past.  Rachel and Tanner, discussing the Watts photograph when Rachel first acquired it—­Tanner’s eager denunciatory talk—­he called himself an “impressionist”—­the creature!—­because he couldn’t draw worth a cent—­Rachel all smiles and deference.  She had never given him that sort of attention.  Or Rachel at a housewarming in the next farm to his—­Rachel in a pale green dress, the handsomest woman there, dancing with Tanner—­Rachel quarrelling with him in the buggy on the way home, because he called Tanner a milksop—­“He cares for beautiful things, and you don’t!—­but that’s no reason why you should abuse him.”

And what about those weeks not very long after that dance, when he had gone off to the land-sale at Edmonton (that was the journey, by the way, when he first saw Anita!), and Rachel had stayed at home, with a girl friend, a girl they knew in Winnipeg?  But that girl hadn’t stayed all the time.  To do her justice, Rachel had made no secret of that.  He remembered her attacking him when he came home for having left her for three or four days quite alone.  Why had he been so long away?  Probably a mere bluff—­though he had been taken in by it at the time, and being still in love with her, had done his best to appease her.  But what had she been doing all the time she was alone?  In the light of what he knew now, she might have been doing anything. Was the child his?

So, piece by piece, with no auditor but his own brain, shut in upon himself by the isolation which his own life had forged for him, he built up a hideous indictment against the woman he had once loved.  He wished he had put off his interview with her till he had had time to think things out more.  As he came to realize how she had tricked and bested him, her offence became incredibly viler than it seemed at first.  He had let her off far too cheaply that night at the farm.  Scenes of past violence returned upon him, and the memory of them seemed to satisfy a rising thirst.  Especially the recollection of the divorce proceedings maddened him.  His morbid brain took hold on them with a grip that his will could not loosen.  Her evidence—­he had read it in the Winnipeg newspapers—­the remarks of the prating old judge—­and of her cad of a lawyer—­good God!  And all the time it was she who ought to have been in the dock, and he the accuser, if he had known—­if he hadn’t been a trusting idiot, a bleating fool.