“Walter—­if you’d only say it isn’t true—­”

“What Edith told you?”

“Edith?  Your sister?  No; about that woman—­that you—­that she—­”

“Why are you bringing all that up again, at this unearthly hour?”

“Then,” she said coldly, “it is true.”

His silence lay between them like a sword.

She had rehearsed this scene many times in the five hours; but she had not prepared herself for this.  Her dread had been held captive by her belief, her triumphant anticipation of Majendie’s denial.

Presently he spoke; and his voice was strange to her as the voice of another man.

“Anne,” he said, “didn’t she tell you?  It was before I knew you.  And it was the only time.”

“Don’t speak to me,” she cried with a sudden passion, and lay shuddering.

She rose, slipped from the bed, and went to a chair that stood by the open window.  There she sat, with her back to the bed, and her eyes staring over the grey parade and out to the eastern sea.

“Anne,” said her husband, “what are you doing there?”

Anne made no answer.

“Come back to bed; you’ll catch cold.”

He waited.

“How long are you going to sit there in that draught?”

She sat on, upright, immovable, in her thin nightgown, raked by the keen air of the dawn.  Majendie raised himself on his elbow.  He could just see her where she glimmered, and her braid of hair, uncoiled, hanging to her waist.  Up till now he had been profoundly unhappy and ashamed, but something in the unconquerable obstinacy of her attitude appealed to the devil that lived in him, a devil of untimely and disastrous humour.  The right thing, he felt, was not to appear as angry as he was.  He sat up on his pillow, and began to talk to her with genial informality.

“See here,—­I suppose you want an explanation.  But don’t you think we’d better wait until we’re up?  Up and dressed, I mean.  I can’t talk seriously before I’ve had a bath and—­and brushed my hair.  You see, you’ve taken rather an unfair advantage of me by getting out of bed.”  (He paused for an answer, and still no answer came.)—­“Don’t imagine I’m ignobly lying down all the time, wrapped in a blanket.  I’m sitting on my pillow.  I know there’s any amount to be said.  But how do you suppose I’m going to say it if I’ve got to stay here, all curled up like a blessed Buddha, and you’re planted away over there like a monument of all the Christian virtues?  Are you coming back to bed, or are you not?”

She shivered.  To her mind his flippancy, appalling in the circumstances, sufficiently revealed the man he was.  The man she had known and married had never existed.  For she had married Walter Majendie believing him to be good.  The belief had been so rooted in her that nothing but his own words or his own silence could have cast it out.  She had loved Walter Majendie; but it was another man who