Isabel had ceased to listen.  Without her own will a scene had sprung up before her eyes:  an imaginary scene, like one of those romantic adventures that she had invented a thousand times before—­but this was not romantic nor was she precisely the heroine.  A foreign hotel with long corridors and many rooms:  a door thoughtlessly left ajar:  and through it a glimpse of Lawrence—­her husband—­holding another woman in his arms.  It was lifelike, she could have counted the buds embroidered on the girl’s blouse, their rose-pink reflected in the hot flush on Hyde’s cheek and the glow in his eyes as he stooped over her.  And then the imaginary Isabel with a pain at her heart like the stab of a knife, and a smile of inexpressible self-contempt on her lips, noiselessly closed the door so that no one else might see what she had seen, and left him. . . .  It would all happen one day, if not that way, some other way; and he would come to her by and by without explanation—­she was convinced that he would not lie to her—­smiling, the hot glow still on his face, a subdued air of well-being diffused over him from head to foot—­and then?  The vision faded; her clairvoyance, which had already carried her far beyond her experience, broke down in sheer anguish.  But reason took it up and told her that she would speak to him, and that he would apologize and she would forgive him—­and that it would all happen again the next time temptation met him in a weak hour.

Faithful? it was not in him to be faithful:  with so much that was generous and gallant, there was this vice of taste in him which had offended her that first morning on the moor and again at night in Laura’s garden, and which now led him to make love to her when she was under his protection and while the scent of Mrs. Cleve’s flowers still clung to his coat.  And what love! if he had simply spoken to her out of his need of her, one would not have known how to resist, but it was he who was to be the giver, and what he offered was the measure of what he desired—­a lesson in passion and a liberal allowance. . . .

“O no, no, no, I can’t!” Isabel cried out, turning from him.  “Yes, I love you, but I don’t trust you, and I won’t marry you.  I’m too much afraid.”

“Afraid of me?”

“Afraid of the pain.”

“What pain?”

“And the—­wickedness of it.”  Lawrence, frozen with astonishment—­he had foreseen resistance, but not of this quality—­let fall her hand.  “Yes, we’ll part now.  We can part now.  I love you, but not too much to get over it in a year or so; and you? you’ll forget sooner, because I’m not worth remembering.”

“Forget you?”

“Oh! yes, it’s not as if you really cared for me; you wouldn’t talk to me of money if you did.  But I suppose you’ve known so many. . . .  Val warned me long ago that you had not a good name with women.”

“Val said that?  Val!”

“And now you’re angry with Val; I repeat what I oughtn’t to repeat, and make mischief.  Lawrence, this isn’t Val’s doing; it isn’t even Mrs. Cleve’s:  it’s my own cowardice.  I daren’t marry you.”