“William!”

Ashe rose slowly from the deep chair in which he had been sitting.  His aspect seemed to her terrified eyes utterly and wholly changed.  In his hand he held a book like those on the table, and a paper-cutter.  His face expressed the remote abstraction of a man who has been wrestling his way through some hard contest of the mind.

She ran to him.  She wound her arms round him.

“William, William!  I didn’t mean any harm!  I didn’t!  Oh, I have been so miserable!  I tried to stop it—­I did all I could.  I have hardly slept at all—­since we talked—­you remember?  Oh, William, look at me!  Don’t be angry with me!”

Ashe disengaged himself.

“I have asked Blanche to pack for me to-night, Kitty.  I go home by the early train to-morrow.”

“Home!”

She stood petrified; then a light flashed into her face.

“You’ll buy it all up?  You’ll stop it, William?”

Ashe drew himself together.

“I am going home,” he said, with slow decision, “to place my resignation in the hands of Lord Parham.”

XXI

Kitty fell back in silence, staring at William.  She loosened her mantle and threw it off, then she sat down in a chair near the wood fire, and bent over it, shivering.

“Of course you didn’t mean that, William?” she said, at last.

Ashe turned.

“I should not have said it unless I had meant every word of it.  It is, of course, the only thing to be done.”

Kitty looked at him miserably.  “But you can’t mean that—­that you’ll resign because of that book?”

She pulled it towards her and turned over the pages with a hand that trembled.  “That would be too foolish!”

Ashe made no reply.  He was standing before the fire, with his hands in his pockets, and a face half absent, half ironical, as though his mind followed the sequences of a far distant future.

“William!” She caught the sleeve of his coat with a little cry.  “I wrote that book because I thought it would help you.”

His attention came back to her.

“Yes, Kitty, I believe you did.”

She gulped down a sob.  His tone was so odd, so remote.

“Many people have done such things.  I know they have.  Why—­why, it was only meant—­as a skit—­to make people laugh!  There’s no harm in it, William.”

Ashe, without speaking, took up the book and looked back at certain pages, which he seemed to have marked.  Kitty’s feeling as she watched him was the feeling of the condemned culprit, held dumb and strangled in the grip of his own sense of justice, and yet passionately conscious how much more he could say for himself than anybody is ever likely to say for him.

“When did you have the first idea of this book, Kitty?”

“About a year ago,” she said, in a low voice.

“In October?  At Haggart?”