For during the last fortnight, as it seemed to Ashe, all the winds of tempest had been blowing through his house.  Himself, the servants, even Margaret, even the child, had all suffered.  He also had lost his temper several times—­such a thing had scarcely happened to him since his childhood.  He thought of it as of a kind of physical stain or weakness.  To keep an even and stoical mind, to laugh where one could not conquer—­this had always seemed to him the first condition of decent existence.  And now to be wrangling over an expenditure, an engagement, a letter, the merest nothing—­whether it was a fine day or it wasn’t—­could anything be more petty, degrading, intolerable?

He vowed that this should stop.  Whatever happened, he and Kitty should not degenerate into a pair of scolds—­besmirch their life with quarrels as ugly as they were silly.  He would wrestle with her, his beloved, unreasonable, foolish Kitty; he ought, of course, to have done so before.  But it was only within the last week or so that the horizon had suddenly darkened—­the thing grown serious.  And now this beastly paragraph!  But, after all, what did such garbage matter?  It would of course be a comfort to thrash the editor.  But our modern life breeds such creatures, and they have to be borne.

* * * * *

He let himself into a silent house.  His letters lay on the hall-table.  Among them was a handwriting which arrested him.  He remembered, yet could not put a name to it.  Then he turned the envelope.  “H’m.  Lady Grosville!” He read it, standing there, then thrust it into his pocket, thinking angrily that there seemed to be a good many fools in this world who occupied themselves with other people’s business.  Exaggeration, of course, damnable parti pris!  When did she ever see Kitty except with a jaundiced eye?  “I wonder Kitty condescends to go to the woman’s house!  She must know that everything she does is seen there en noir.  Pharisaical, narrow-minded Philistines!”

The letter acted as a tonic.  Ashe was positively grateful to the “old gorgon” who wrote it.  He ran up-stairs, his pulses tingling in defence of Kitty.  He would show Lady Grosville that she could not write to him, at any rate, in that strain, with impunity.

He took a candle from the landing, and opened his wife’s door in order to pass through her room to his own.  As he did so, he ran against Kitty’s maid, Blanche, who was coming out.  She shrank back as she saw him, but not before the light of his candle had shone full upon her.  Her face was disfigured with tears, which were, indeed, still running down her cheeks.

“Why, Blanche!” he said, standing still—­then in the kind voice which endeared him to the servants—­“I am afraid your brother is worse?”

For the poor brother in hospital had passed through many vicissitudes since his operation, and the little maid’s spirits had fluctuated accordingly.