“We must fly,” said Julia, rising.  “Our taxi’s outside, with all the clothes I’ve had time to pack, upon it.  Desmond had packed in anticipation, the wretch!  And we’ve only got an hour—­but we just had to come in and tell you before we went.”

“I hope you and Osborn will have another honeymoon like ours is going to be,” Rokeby cried as they hurried through the hall.

She shook her head, vaguely smiling, but her lips would frame nothing.  She was glad to shut the door upon their happiness.  It seemed as if everything young and fierce in her were pulling at her heart.  How she wanted it again, that amazing rapture and discovery!  As she sat down again by her fire in the quiet flat, she would have bartered half the remaining years of her life for just that first year over again.

She went across to the window, pulled aside a curtain, and beheld rows and darts of lights like stars; street lights and house lights beckoned to her; she opened the window slightly and the distant sound of traffic, the drums of London rolling, excited and affrayed her.

She felt too young for the sedateness into which her life was settling.

Restless as she was, she had trained herself too well in the ruthless habits of method and industry not to begin automatically to set all in order against the coming of the master of the home.  Feeling the need of doing rather than of thinking, she went to the bureau, and picked her account-books from their pigeonholes.  Accurate and businesslike, they should be presented.  They were ruled with neat margins, the columns headed precisely; each quarter of the year showing a favourable balance in hand.  There was no doubt but that she was a creditable housekeeper.  She opened them one by one memorising with a certain pleasure their tributes to her capacity.  One big item had been wiped off altogether last spring, after her mother’s death:  the rest of the furniture instalments, which, on the extended system for which Osborn had been obliged to arrange after George’s birth, would have dragged on for two years more.  Grannie Amber’s sale had more than paid for all.

“He can’t say I haven’t been careful,” she thought.  Besides, she was now a woman with an income of her own; with two hundred and twenty pounds a year in her pocket, the right to which no man could question.  If he demurred at the maid, and at George’s school bills, she could point to her ability to pay.

She knew how greatly she had changed during their separation; to the change that might have been wrought in Osborn she gave little, thought, not caring much.  She supposed that he would come home much as he left it, refreshed doubtless, better-tempered, and full of his holiday, to the stories of which she would give a dutifully interested hearing.  But that he could ever rouse again in her the passion and pain which had prostrated her on the night when she knew he was to leave her was ironically impossible.  As she sat over her account-books, her memory cast back to that evening, how she had stood, in silent agony, beside the table, sorting over his stock of clothes; how feverishly and blindly she had sewed, trying to hide from him all that to-morrow meant to her; how, when he had gone to bed, she had kneeled by his chair and sobbed, and prayed that no other woman should ever wean him from her....