Mr. Wilkins, who had not been abroad since before the war, and was noticing with increasing disgust, as week followed week of wind and rain, the peculiar persistent vileness of the weather, and slowly conceived a desire to get away from England for Easter.  He was doing very well in his business.  He could afford a trip.  Switzerland was useless in April.  There was a familiar sound about Easter in Italy.  To Italy he would go; and as it would cause comment if he did not take his wife, take her he must—­besides, she would be useful; a second person was always useful in a country whose language one did not speak for holding things, for waiting with the luggage.

He had expected an explosion of gratitude and excitement.  The absence of it was incredible.  She could not, he concluded, have heard.  Probably she was absorbed in some foolish day-dream.  It was regrettable how childish she remained.

He turned his head—­their chairs were in front of the fire—­and looked at her.  She was staring straight into the fire, and it was no doubt the fire that made her face so red.

“I am thinking,” he repeated, raising his clear, cultivated voice and speaking with acerbity, for inattention at such a moment was deplorable, “of taking you to Italy for Easter.  Did you not hear me?”

Yes, she had heard him, and she had been wondering at the extraordinary coincidence—­really most extraordinary—­she was just going to tell him how—­how she had been invited—­a friend had invited her—­Easter, too—­Easter was in April, wasn’t it?—–­her friend had a—­ had a house there.

In fact Mrs. Wilkins, driven by terror, guilt and surprise, had been more incoherent if possible than usual.

It was a dreadful afternoon.  Mellersh, profoundly indignant, besides having his intended treat coming back on him like a blessing to roost, cross-examined her with the utmost severity.  He demanded that she refuse the invitation.  He demanded that, since she had so outrageously accepted it without consulting him, she should write and cancel her acceptance.  Finding himself up against an unsuspected, shocking rock of obstinacy in her, he then declined to believe she had been invited to Italy at all.  He declined to believe in this Mrs. Arbuthnot, of whom till that moment he had never heard; and it was only when the gentle creature was brought round—­with such difficulty, with such a desire on her part to throw the whole thing up rather than tell Mr. Wilkins less than the truth—­and herself endorsed his wife’s statements that he was able to give them credence.  He could not but believe Mrs. Arbuthnot.  She produced the precise effect on him that she did on Tube officials.  She hardly needed to say anything.  But that made no difference to her conscience, which knew and would not let her forget that she had given him an incomplete impression.  “Do you,” asked her conscience, “see any real difference between an incomplete impression and a completely stated lie?  God sees none.”