Turning away again he finished his dressing to the accompaniment of her high-pitched ceaseless prattle.  Her conversation was empty and almost inconsequent, filled with rambling descriptions of the newest gowns, with broken bits of intimate personal gossip, but the very rush of words which came from her served to create an atmosphere of merriment at dinner.  A little later at the music hall she insisted upon talking to Adams in exaggerated whispers, until the pointless jokes she made about the arms or the legs of the dancers, sent her into convulsions of noiseless hysterical laughter.  Through it all Adams sat patiently wondering whether he suffered more from the boredom of the ballet or from the neuralgia caused by a draught which blew directly on the back of his neck.  That the show amused Connie was sufficient reason for sticking it out until the end, but there were moments during the long evening, when he felt, as he sat with his blank gaze fixed upon the glancing red legs on the stage, that every stifled yawn was but an unuttered exclamation of profanity.

“Now really and truly was it worth it?” he asked, with a laugh, when they stood again at their own door.

“But didn’t you think it lovely?” enquired Connie, irritably, as she entered the hall and paused a moment under the electric light.  The excitement had faded from her face, leaving it parched and wan as from a burned out fire, and the sinister blue shadows had leaped out in the hollows beneath her eyes.

“I think you were,” he answered merrily, following her as she turned away and went slowly up the staircase.

A smile at the compliment flickered for an instant upon her lips; then as she reached her bedroom, her strength failed her utterly, and with a little moaning cry she swayed forward and fell in a huddled pink heap upon the floor.  As he lifted her she begged piteously for wine—­brandy—­for anything which would drive away the terrible faintness.

“It is like falling into a gulf,” she cried, “I am slipping away and I can’t hold myself—­”

He measured a dose of cognac and gave it to her with a little water, but when, after swallowing it eagerly, she begged for more, he shook his head and began undressing her as he would have undressed a child.  A touch at the bell, he knew, would bring her maid, but a powerful delicacy constrained him as he was about to ring; these were scenes whose very hideousness made them sacred, and with Connie’s distracted raving in his ears, he became suddenly thankful for the absolute loneliness, for the empty house around him.  As she lay upon the bed where he had placed her, looking, he thought even then, like a crushed blossom in her gown of pale pink chiffon, he bent over her in an anguish of pity which oppressed him like a physical weight.  The very hatred in her eyes as she looked up at him made the burden of his sympathy the heavier to bear.  Had she loved him it might have been easier for her,