The road to the station was a long and particularly beautiful one.  Hereward had always appreciated every inch of it.  But to-day he hated it.  He hated the way the yew-trees drooped, the leafless branches of the hazels, the faded, crumpled blackberry, the scattered decaying leaves.  It was really a remarkable day for November—­clear and frosty, with a bright blue sky and scudding white clouds.  A strong north-east wind tested one’s vitality.  Hereward’s was low.  He buttoned his collar and hurried on.

Mary had never treated him quite like this before.  She had always been tender, sympathetic and understanding with his moods.  True, he was trying; but she had known that before she married him.  He was an artist, and an artist’s work, he argued, depended largely on the state of his emotions.  He earned the family bread by the labour of his hands and his hand was the servant of his mind, and his mind a tempest of moods.  Mary had applied herself to her task with creditable skill.  She could always turn his sullenness to a sort of creative melancholy of which he was rather proud; his restlessness to energy and his discontent to something like constructive thinking.  How she achieved the miracle he did not know, nor did he inquire.  But he was guided by her as a child by its mother, still constantly rebelling.

But to-day the machinery had broken down.  Mary had been cool, pleasant and crisply unemotional at breakfast-time.  He had woken up cross and with a headache.  He had a muddled feeling and wanted sorting out.  But Mary seemed quite unaware of it.  She had a preoccupied manner; she went about just too cheerfully, chatting just too pleasantly about trivial things.  It was mechanical, Hereward decided, and, anyway, it wasn’t at all what he wanted.  His monosyllabic responses were accepted as perfectly right and natural, when they were nothing of the sort.  She did not get up and pass her hand lovingly and soothingly over his hair and say things appropriate to his state of mind.  She went on with her breakfast and looked after him kindly enough, but without solicitude.

For instance, she made no comment on the fact that he had hardly touched his bacon; she merely removed his plate and gave him marmalade and toast as if he had left no bacon at all.  She didn’t even notice the lines of suffering on his face, the dark circles under his eyes.  He cast a glance in the mirror when her back was turned to see if they were obvious.  They were.  Why wasn’t Mary catching his hump?  She always did.

When finally he left the house, a little bent, with no spring in his step, Mary didn’t accompany him to the door.  She didn’t exchange with him one of those rapid looks of complete understanding that he had grown so accustomed to and found so sustaining and helpful.  She kissed him firmly and coolly, almost casually.  Just so she might kiss an aunt.