As the cab started he looked over his shoulder at Anne through the front window.  “Well worth trying,” he said to himself.  “It’s the way to be even with her.  And it’s the way to be free.”

They arrived at the cottage.  Possibly, repose had restored Anne’s strength.  Possibly, the sight of the place had roused the instinct of self-preservation in her at last.  To Geoffrey’s surprise, she left the cab without assistance.  When he opened the wooden gate, with his own key, she recoiled from it, and looked at him for the first time.

He pointed to the entrance.

“Go in,” he said.

“On what terms?” she asked, without stirring a step.

Geoffrey dismissed the cab; and sent the lad in, to wait for further orders.  These things done, he answered her loudly and brutally the moment they were alone: 

“On any terms I please.”

“Nothing will induce me,” she said, firmly, “to live with you as your wife.  You may kill me—­but you will never bend me to that.”

He advanced a step—­opened his lips—­and suddenly checked himself.  He waited a while, turning something over in his mind.  When he spoke again, it was with marked deliberation and constraint—­with the air of a man who was repeating words put into his lips, or words prepared beforehand.

“I have something to tell you in the presence of witnesses,” he said.  “I don’t ask you, or wish you, to see me in the cottage alone.”

She started at the change in him.  His sudden composure, and his sudden nicety in the choice of words, tried her courage far more severely than it had been tried by his violence of the moment before.

He waited her decision, still pointing through the gate.  She trembled a little—­steadied herself again—­and went in.  The lad, waiting in the front garden, followed her.

He threw open the drawing-room door, on the left-hand side of the passage.  She entered the room.  The servant-girl appeared.  He said to her, “Fetch Mrs. Dethridge; and come back with her yourself.”  Then he went into the room; the lad, by his own directions, following him in; and the door being left wide open.

Hester Dethridge came out from the kitchen with the girl behind her.  At the sight of Anne, a faint and momentary change passed over the stony stillness of her face.  A dull light glimmered in her eyes.  She slowly nodded her head.  A dumb sound, vaguely expressive of something like exultation or relief, escaped her lips.

Geoffrey spoke—­once more, with marked deliberation and constraint; once more, with the air of repeating something which had been prepared beforehand.  He pointed to Anne.

“This woman is my wife,” he said.  “In the presence of you three, as witnesses, I tell her that I don’t forgive her.  I have brought her here—­having no other place in which I can trust her to be—­to wait the issue of proceedings, undertaken in defense of my own honor and good name.  While she stays here, she will live separate from me, in a room of her own.  If it is necessary for me to communicate with her, I shall only see her in the presence of a third person.  Do you all understand me?”