He threw the newspaper on the table at his side, and thought over what he had read.

If he had done nothing else, he had drained the bitter cup to the dregs.  When he looked back, he saw nothing but the life that he had wasted.  When his thoughts turned to the future, they confronted a prospect empty of all promise to a man still in the prime of life.  Wife and child were as completely lost to him as if they had been dead—­and it was the wife’s doing.  Had he any right to complain?  Not the shadow of a right.  As the newspapers said, he had deserved it.

The clock roused him, striking the hour.

He rose hurriedly, and advanced toward the window.  As he crossed the room, he passed by a mirror.  His own sullen despair looked at him in the reflection of his face.  “She will be back directly,” he remembered; “she mustn’t see me like this!” He went on to the window to divert his mind (and so to clear his face) by watching the stream of life flowing by in the busy street.  Artificial cheerfulness, assumed love in Sydney’s presence—­that was what his life had come to already.

If he had known that she had gone out, seeking a temporary separation, with his fear of self-betrayal—­if he had suspected that she, too, had thoughts which must be concealed:  sad forebodings of losing her hold on his heart, terrifying suspicions that he was already comparing her, to her own disadvantage, with the wife whom he had deserted—­if he had made these discoveries, what would the end have been?  But she had, thus far, escaped the danger of exciting his distrust.  That she loved him, he knew.  That she had begun to doubt his attachment to her he would not have believed, if his oldest friend had declared it on the best evidence.  She had said to him, that morning, at breakfast:  “There was a good woman who used to let lodgings here in London, and who was very kind to me when I was a child;” and she had asked leave to go to the house, and inquire if that friendly landlady was still living—­with nothing visibly constrained in her smile, and with no faltering tone in her voice.  It was not until she was out in the street that the tell-tale tears came into her eyes, and the bitter sigh broke from her, and mingled its little unheard misery with the grand rise and fall of the tumult of London life.  While he was still at the window, he saw her crossing the street on her way back to him.  She came into the room with her complexion heightened by exercise; she kissed him, and said with her pretty smile:  “Have you been lonely without me?” Who would have supposed that the torment of distrust, and the dread of desertion, were busy at this woman’s heart?

He placed a chair for her, and seating himself by her side asked if she felt tired.  Every attention that she could wish for from the man whom she loved, offered with every appearance of sincerity on the surface!  She met him halfway, and answered as if her mind was quite at ease.