“Why?—­do you mind?” said he.

“Well—­when it’s night after night—­”

“Is it that you mind my dining with the Hannays, or my leaving you?”

“I mind both.”

“Oh—­if I’d thought you wanted me to stay—­”

She made no answer, but rose and led the way to the dining-room.

He followed.  Her arm had touched him as she passed him in the doorway, and his heart beat thickly, as he realised the strength of her dominion over him.  She had only to say “Stay,” and he stayed; or “Come,” and she could always draw him to her.  He had never turned away.  His very mind was faithful to her.  It had not even conceived, and it would have had difficulty in grasping, the idea of happiness without her.

To-night he was profoundly moved by this intimation of his wife’s desire to have him with her.  His surprise and satisfaction made him curiously shy.  He sat through two courses without speaking, without lifting his eyes from his plate; brooding over their separation.  He was wondering whether, after all, it had been so inevitable; whether he had misunderstood her; whether, if he had had the sense to understand, he might not have kept her.  It was possible she had been wounded by his absences.  He had never explained them.  He could not tell her that she had made him afraid to be alone with her.

The situation, which he had accepted so obediently, had been more than a mere mortal man could endure.  Especially in the terrible five minutes after dinner, before they settled for the evening, when each sat waiting to see if the other had anything to say.  Sometimes Majendie would take up his book and Anne her work.  She would sew, and sew, patient, persistent, in her tragic silence.  And when he could bear it no longer, he would put down his book and go quietly away, to relieve the intolerable constraint that held her.  Sometimes it was Anne who read, while he smoked and brooded.  Then, in the warm, consenting stillness of the summer evenings (they were now in June), her presence seemed to fill the room; he was possessed by the sense of it; by the sound of her breathing; by the stirring of her body in the chair, or of her fingers on the pages of her book; and he would get up suddenly and leave her, dragging his passion from the sight of her.

As he considered these things, many perplexities, many tendernesses, stirred in him and kept him still.

Anne watched him from the other end of the table, and her thoughts debased him.  He seemed to her disagreeably incommunicative, and she had found an ignoble explanation of his mood.  There had been too much salt in the soup, and now there was something wrong with the salmon.  He had not responded to her apology for these accidents, and she supposed that they had been enough to spoil his evening with her.

She had come to consider him a creature grossly wedded to material things.

“It’s a pity you stayed,” said she.  “Mrs. Hannay would have given you a better dinner.”