There was a sharp bitter cry, stifled in the instant of its utterance, and Tyson started to his feet.  His mouth worked convulsively.  “My God!  I don’t care who’s responsible for this filthy world.  Nobody but a fiend could take that little thing and torture her so.  Think of it, Louis!”

“I’m trying not to think of it.  It’s damnable as you say, but—­other women have to stand it.”

“Other women!” Tyson flung the words out like an execration that throbbed with his scorn and loathing of the sex.  Other women!  By an act of his will he had put his wife on a high pedestal for the moment—­made her shine, for the moment, white and fair above the contemptible herd, her obscure multitudinous sisterhood.  Other women!  The phrase had an undertone of dull passionate self-reproach that was distinctly audible to Stanistreet’s finer ear.  Stanistreet knew many things about Tyson—­knew, for instance, the cause that but for this would have taken him up to town; and Tyson knew that he knew.

If it came to that, Stanistreet too had some grounds for self-reproach.  He took up a book and tried to read; but the words reeled and staggered and grew dim before him; he found himself listening to the ticking of the clock, and the pulse of time became a woman’s heart beating violently with pain, a heart indistinguishable from his own.  Other women (it was he who had used the words)—­was it simply by her share in their grim lot that Mrs. Nevill Tyson had contrived to invest herself with this somber significance?  Perhaps.  It was the same woman that he had driven with, laughed with, flirted with a hundred times—­the woman that in the natural course of things (Tyson apart) he would infallibly have made love to; and yet in one day and one night her prettinesses, her impertinences had fallen from her like a frivolous garment, leaving only the simple eternal lines of her womanhood.  Henceforth, whatever he might think, he would not think of her to-morrow as he had thought yesterday; whatever he felt to-morrow, his feeling would never lose that purifying touch of tragic pity.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson would never be the same woman that he had known before.  And yet—­she was a fool, a fool; and he doubted if her sufferings would make her any wiser.

Tyson looked at his watch.  “Look there, Stanistreet, it’s two o’clock—­there must be some blundering.  I’ll speak to Baker.  What are those damned doctors thinking of!  Why can’t they have done with it?  Why can’t they put her under chloroform?”

One by one the lamps over the billiard-table died down and went out; the firelight leapt and started on the wall, making the gloom of the great room visible; in the half-darkness Tyson became clairvoyant, and his self-reproach grew dominant and clamorous.  “It’s all my fault—­if she dies it’ll be my fault!  But how was I to know?  How could I tell that anything like this would happen?  I swear I’d die rather than let her go through this villainy a second time.  It’s infamous—­I’ll kill myself before it happens again!” He flung himself on the sofa and turned his face to the wall, muttering invectives, blasphemies—­a confused furious arraignment of the finite and the Infinite.