“He can’t say he wasn’t made comfortable when he came in.”

She went out, with a small sense of satisfaction, and called softly along the corridor, “Good night, babies,” before she left the flat.  It was very, very cold, and she was more than ready for her own bed.

She travelled homewards upon the Tube.

Before she slept, however, Julia had a letter to write, to Desmond Rokeby; she addressed it to his business address, which she happened to know, and marked it Very urgent.  The contents were as urgent as the instruction upon the envelope, and once again that night she left the Ladies’ Club to post the letter at the pillar-box at the corner.  It would be cleared at midnight, and Rokeby should get his news by the first post in the morning.

Then Julia Winter slept; but although her head was full of two babies, a grown-girl one and a tiny weakling one, together in a soiled pink room, it was not of them that she dreamed.  She was sitting once more at a balcony table in the quiet red restaurant with the big mirrors, facing an unusual kind of man who cared as little what she thought of him as she cared what he thought of her; the restaurant was warm and rosy, and they drifted upon the flying hours, like two voyagers upon a happy river.

CHAPTER XII

BEHIND THE VEIL

Marie heard Osborn come in and go to the dining-room and hit an unresponsive mass of coal vigorously, but she gave no sign.  In the darkness she listened for all the sounds she had learned to know so well; his movements in the dressing-room, his splashing as he washed face and hands in the bathroom, his pat-pat tread in carpet slippers along the corridor to their door.  To-night he paused here, as if listening; and it seemed as if her heart paused, too, while she also listened for him.  But he spoke no word, and she spoke none, and the baby slept, so presently she heard the cautious turning of the handle and his careful entry.

She feigned sleep.

He knew, by tiny signs he had learnt to discover, that she was not asleep, but he feigned belief that she was.

His bed creaked to tell her that he was getting into it, in the darkness, by her side.

Both Marie and Osborn were still angry, sore, insulted and resentful, and, like other married people in small homes, they must intrude upon each other intimately, sleep side by side, wake side by side, and remain as closely conscious of each other as if they dwelt together, by mutual desire, in a perpetual garden of roses.  True, there was a bed in Osborn’s dressing-room, but it was an uncomfortable bed of the fold-up family, and when he came in to-night it was folded against the wall, and he did not know exactly where its particular blankets were kept.  He looked at it, thinking, “God!  If I could only sleep here for a night or two!” But he allowed himself to be daunted by the problem of the blankets, and he went, as usual, to the room he shared with Marie.