What an extraordinary exhibition!  What weakness of temper and nerve!

She knew it was more.  It had been the terribleness of love.

“And now?” she mused.

It made her smile a little, lazily and serenely.

But now and again she sighed with a sharp envy, thinking of Julia and
Desmond.

She waked often in the solitude of the night, imaging the bride and bridegroom on the track of rapture, following the unwaning star.

In the morning there was a cablegram for her, reading:  “Home on
Thursday.—­OSBORN.”

To-day was Monday.  She stood with tight lips for a moment wondering just how to set this scene of reunion; the flat was not large, comprising as it did the tiny slip of a room in which the maid slept, the children’s room, her own, and the two sitting-rooms and kitchen.  All the day she arranged and rearranged the accommodation in her head.

She was not only reluctant for Osborn, but almost shy of him; he had left her thoughts so that it seemed impossible that he had ever had the right to intrude, at all hours, on her privacy; impossible that it should ever be so again.  After all, there were many husbands and wives who went their own way, led their own lives, and the outside world never knew.  To such a confraternity would she and Osborn now belong, living under one roof, but separated, separated not only by walls, but will.

For she did not want him any more; she could not contemplate his assumption of the husbandly role.  It sounded strange as she uttered it aloud to herself, but there it was.

“I do not want him any more.”

She thought:  “Had he never gone away, had we gone on living as we lived then, year in, year out, this would never have happened.  People don’t get out of a deep rut like that unless they’re helped out.  But now I’ve had a year to get my looks back; to sit down and think, and I know things that I should never have guessed before.”

After she had taken the baby for her morning airing on the Heath, she left the two younger children with the maid, and went into town to lunch.  She chose again the Royal Red, but not the table behind the pillar from which she had peered, glad of its shelter for her shabbiness, a year ago.  She took a table at the side of the room where she could see and be seen, and she looked at the other women without envy or hatred, with no more than a level sense of rivalry which was almost pleasant.  If she had not known how well she looked, the glances of men would have told her.  She lingered long over her coffee, enjoying her opportunity and her freedom, and telling herself—­resolved as she was that it should not be so—­“Well, it’s probably my last time like this.”

She was in Regent Street after lunch, looking into a blouse shop, when she saw close at hand the Beauty Parlour sign which brought to her memory at once the sleek pale girl with the emerald earrings.  Something made her curious to see the girl again, and she went in, to find her still there, the emeralds still in her beautiful close ears, but sharper set, a year wearier.