It would take a long time to unfasten them.  She pulled at the diamond sun on her breast with a shaking hand.  Her husband had given it to her when her eldest son was born.  Her maid took the tiara gently out of her hair, and cut the threads that sewed the diamonds on her breast and shoulders.  Would it never end?  The lace of her gown, cautiously withdrawn through its hundred eyelet-holes, knotted itself.

“Cut it,” she said, impatiently.  “Cut it.”

At last she was in her dressing-gown and alone.  She flung herself face downwards on the sofa.  Her attitude had the touch of artificiality which was natural to her.

The deluge had arrived, and unconsciously she met it, as she would have made a heroine meet it had she been a novelist, in a white dressing-gown and pink ribbons in a stereotyped attitude of despair on a divan.

Conscience is supposed to make cowards of us all, but it is a matter of common experience that the unimaginative are made cowards of only by being found out.

Had David qualms of conscience when Uriah fell before the besieged city?  Surely if he had he would have winced at the obvious parallel of the prophet’s story about the ewe lamb.  But apparently he remained serenely obtuse till the indignant author’s “Thou art the man” unexpectedly nailed him to the cross of his sin.

And so it was with Lady Newhaven.  She had gone through the twenty-seven years of her life believing herself to be a religious and virtuous person.  She was so accustomed to the idea that it had become a habit, and now the whole of her self-respect was in one wrench torn from her.  The events of the last year had not worn it down to its last shred, had not even worn the nap off.  It was dragged from her intact, and the shock left her faint and shuddering.

The thought that her husband knew, and had thought fit to conceal his knowledge, had never entered her mind, any more than the probability that she had been seen by some of the servants kneeling listening at a keyhole.  The mistake which all unobservant people make is to assume that others are as unobservant as themselves.

By what frightful accident, she asked herself, had this catastrophe come about?  She thought of all the obvious incidents which would have revealed the secret to herself—­the dropped letter, the altered countenance, the badly arranged lie.  No.  She was convinced her secret had been guarded with minute, with scrupulous care.  The only thing she had forgotten in her calculations was her husband’s character, if, indeed, she could be said to have forgotten that which she had never known.

Lord Newhaven was in his wife’s eyes a very quiet man of few words.  That his few words did not represent the whole of him had never occurred to her.  She had often told her friends that he walked through life with his eyes shut.  He had a trick of half shutting his eyes which confirmed her in this opinion.  When she came across persons who were after a time discovered to have affections and interests of which they had not spoken, she described them as “cunning.”  She had never thought Edward “cunning” till to-night.  How had he, of all men, discovered this—­this—?  She, had no words ready to call her conduct by, though words would not have failed her had she been denouncing the same conduct in another wife and mother.