“’Tis no senseless fury, madam!  There’s reason at the bottom of it, my lady!  I must know, and I will know, what it is that my visit interferes with.  You were not going out, I can see by your dress.  Nor expecting company.  Unless—­no, it couldn’t be that!  You’re not capable of that!  You are my wife, you are Margaret Faringfield, William Faringfield’s daughter.  God forgive the mistrust—­yet every husband with an imagination has tortured himself for an instant sometime with that thought, suppose his wife’s heart might stray?  I’ve heard ’em confess the thought; and even I—­but what a hell it was for the moment it lasted!  And how swiftly I put it from me, to dwell on your tenderness in the old days, your pride that has put you above the hopes of all men but me, the unworthy one you chose to reach down your hand to from your higher level!”

“So you have harboured that suspicion, have you?” she cried, with flashing eyes.

“No, no; harboured it never!  Only let my perverse imagination ’light, for the space of a breath, on the possibility, to my unutterable torment.  All men’s fancies play ’em such tricks now and then, to torture them and take down their vanity.  Men would rest too easy in their security, were it not so.”

“A man that suspects his wife, deserves to lose her allegiance,” cried Margaret, with a kind of triumphant imputation of blame, which was her betrayal.

He gazed at her with the dawning horror of half-conviction.

“Then I have lost yours?” he asked, in a tone stricken with doubt and dread.

“I didn’t say so,” she replied, reddening.

“But your words imply that.  You seemed to be justifying yourself by my suspicion.  But there was no suspicion till now—­nothing but a tormenting fancy of what I believed impossible.  So you cannot excuse yourself that way.”

“I’m not trying to excuse myself.  There’s nothing to excuse.”

“I’m not sure of that!  Your manner looks as if you realised having said too much—­having betrayed yourself.  Margaret, for God’s sake, tell me ’tis not so!  Tell me my fears are wrong!  Assure me I have not lost you—­no, no, I won’t even ask you.  ’Tis not possible.  I won’t believe it of you—­that you could be inconstant!  Forgive me, dear—­your strange manner has so upset me—­but forgive me, I beg, and let me take you in my arms.”  He had risen to approach her.

“No, no!  Don’t.  Don’t touch me!” she cried, rising in turn, for resistance.  She kept her mind fixed upon the expected rewards of her project, and so fortified herself against yielding.

“By heaven, I’ll know what this means!” he cried.  He looked wildly about the room, as if the explanation might somewhere there be found.  Her own glance went with his, as if there might indeed be some evidence, which she must either make shift to conceal, or invent an innocent reason for its presence.  Her eye rested an instant upon a book that lay on the table.  Philip noted this, picked up the book, turned the cover, and read the name on the first leaf.