“And in England women are straight with men.  What they have to say they say.  They don’t lay snares, or lie in ambush.”

She laughed.  “Quant a cela, Col-on-el, il y en a pour tous les gouts, meme en Angleterre.”

“I’ll bid you good-by, madame.”

He bowed stiffly, and went out into the hail.  She continued to smoke daintily, pensively, while she listened to him noisily pulling on his overcoat and taking his stick from the stand.  As he passed the library door he stopped on the threshold.

“By Gad, she’s mine!” he said, fiercely.

She got up and went to him, taking him by the lapel of the coat.  There was something like pity in her eyes as she said:  “My poor fellow, nobody has raised that question.  What’s more, nobody will raise it—­unless you do yourself.”

XXIII

Ashley’s craving was for space and air.  He felt choked, strangled.  There was a high wind blowing, carrying a sleety rain.  It was a physical comfort to turn into the teeth of it.

He took a road straggling out of the town toward the remoter suburbs, and so into the country.  He marched on, his eyes unseeing, his mouth set grimly—­goaded by a kind of frenzy to run away from that which he knew he could not leave behind.  It was like fleeing from something omnipresent.  Though he should turn his back on it never so sternly and travel never so fast, it would be with him.  It had already entered into his life as a constituent element; he could no more get rid of it than of his breath or his blood.

And yet the thing itself eluded him.  In the very attempt to apprehend it by sight or name, he found it mysteriously beyond his grasp.  It was like an enemy in the air, deadly but out of reach.  It had struck him, though he could not as yet tell where.  He could only stride onward through the wind and rain, as a man who has been shot can ride on till he falls.

So he tramped for an hour or more, finding himself at last amid bleak, dreary marshes, over which the November twilight was coming down.  He felt lonely, desolate, far from his familiar things, far from home.  His familiar things were his ambitions, as home was that life of well-ordered English dignity, in which to-morrow will bear some relation to to-day.

He felt used up by the succession of American shocks, of American violences.  They had reduced him to a condition of bewilderment.  For four or five weeks he had scarcely known from minute to minute where he stood.  He had maintained his ground as best he was able, holding out for the moment when he could marry his wife and go his way; and now, when ostensibly the hour had come in which to do it, it was only that he might see confusion worse confounded.

He turned back toward the town.  He did so with a feeling of futility in the act.  Where should he go?  What should he do?  How was he to deal with this new, extraordinary feature in the case?  It was impossible to return to Tory Hill, as if the Marquise had told him nothing, and equally impossible to make what she had said a point of departure for anything else.  If he made it a point of departure for anything at all, it could only be for a step which his whole being rebelled against taking.