Her lip trembled.  Then he pointed to the second—­to the pitiless picture of Lord Parham at Haggart.

“You wrote that—­when he was under our roof—­there by our pressing invitation!  You couldn’t have written it—­unless he had so put himself in your power.  A wandering Arab, Kitty, will do no harm to the man who has eaten and drunk in his tent!”

She looked up, and as she read his face she understood at last how what she had done had outraged in him all the natural and all the inherited instincts of a generous and fastidious nature.  The “great gentleman,” so strong in him as in all the best of English statesmen, whether they spring from the classes or the masses, was up in arms.

She sprang to her feet with a cry.  “William, you can’t give up politics!  It would make you miserable.”

“That can’t be helped.  And I couldn’t go on like this, Kitty—­even if this affair of the book could be patched up.  The strain’s too great.”

They were but a yard apart, and yet she seemed to be looking at him across a gulf.

“You have been so happy in your work!” This time the sob escaped her.

“Oh, don’t let’s talk about that,” he said, abruptly, as he walked away.  “There’ll be a certain relief in giving up the impossible.  I’ll go back to my books.  We can travel, I suppose, and put politics out of our heads.”

“But—­you won’t resign your seat?”

“No,” he said, after a pause—­“no.  As far as I can see at present, I sha’n’t resign my seat, though my constituents, of course, will be very sick.  But I doubt whether I shall stand again.”

Every phrase fell as though with a thud on Kitty’s ear.  It was the wreck of a man’s life, and she had done it.

“Shall you—­shall you go and see Lord Parham?” she asked, after a pause.

“I shall write to him first.  I imagine”—­he pointed to the letter lying on the table—­“that creature has already sent him the book.  Then later I daresay I shall see him.”

She looked up.

“If I wrote and told him it was all my doing, William?—­if I grovelled to him?”

“The responsibility is mine,” he said, sternly.  “I had no business to tell even you the things printed there.  I told them at my own risk.  If anything I say has any weight with you, Kitty, you will write nothing.”

She spread out her hands to the fire again, and he heard her say, as though to herself: 

“The thing is—­the awful thing is, that I’m mad—­I must be mad.  I never thought of all this when I was writing it.  I wrote it in a kind of dream.  In the first place, I wanted to glorify you—­”

He broke into an exclamation.

“Your taste, Kitty!—­where was your taste?  That a wife should praise a husband in public!  You could only make us both laughing-stocks.”

His handsome features quivered a little.  He felt this part of it the most galling, the most humiliating of all; and she understood.  In his eyes she had shown herself not only reckless and treacherous, but indelicate, vulgar, capable of besmirching the most sacred and intimate of relations.