He pushed open the door and entered the unlighted hail, then with a grumbled oath because of the darkness, passed on into the sitting-room.  Except for such light as a bed of soft coal in the grate gave out, the room was clothed in uncertainty.  He stumbled against a chair and swore again savagely.  He was answered by a soft laugh, and then he saw Evelyn seated in the big arm-chair at one side of the fireplace.

“Did you hurt yourself, Marsh?” she asked.

Langham growled an unintelligible reply and dropped heavily into a chair.  He brought with him the fumes of whisky and stale tobacco, and as these reached her across the intervening space Evelyn made a little grimace in the half light.

“I declare, Marsh, you are hardly fit to enter a respectable house!” she said.

In spite of his doubt of her, they were not on the worst of terms, there were still times when he resumed his old role of the lover, when he held her drifting fancy in something of the potent spell he had once been able to weave about her.  Whatever their life together, it was far from commonplace, with its poverty and extravagance, its quarrelings and its reconciliations, while back of it all, deep-rooted in the very dregs of existence, was his passionate love.  Even his brutal indifference was but one of the many phases of his love; it was a manifestation of his revolt against his sense of dependence, a dependence which made it possible for him to love where his faith was destroyed and his trust gone absolutely.  Evelyn was vaguely conscious of this and she was not sure but that she required just such a life as theirs had become, but that she would have been infinitely bored with a man far more worth while than Marshall Langham.  From his seat by the fire Langham scowled across at her, but the scowl was lost in the darkness.

“Your father was here last evening, Marsh,” Evelyn said at length, remembering she had not seen him the night before, and that he had breakfasted and gone before she was up that morning.

“What did he come for?” her husband asked.

“I think to see you.  Poor man, he doesn’t seem able to get the run of the hours you keep; I told him he could always find you here between four and eight in the morning.  I must say this little insight into your domestic habits appeared to distress him, but I tried to comfort him,—­I told him you would probably outlive us all.”  She laughed softly.  “Andy was here this afternoon, Marsh,” she went on.

“What the devil did he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he coming back?”

“He didn’t mention it, if he is.”  And again she laughed.

Langham moved impatiently; her low full-throated mirth jarred on his somber mood.

“Were you in court to-day, Marsh?” she inquired, after a short silence.

“Yes,” he answered briefly.

“Were there many there?”

“Yes.”

“Any ladies, Marsh?” she questioned, with sudden eagerness.