After the return from England Thornton abandoned his puritanical life and returned to the easy ways of his bachelor days.

Meredith knew perfectly well what was going on, but she had her own income and lived her own detached and barren life, so she clung to what seemed to her the last shred of duty she owed to her marriage ties—­she served in her husband’s home as hostess, and by her mere presence she avoided betraying him to the scorn of those who could not know all, and so might not judge justly.

Then the crisis came that shocked Meredith into consciousness and forced her to act, for the first time in her life, independently.

Thornton was about to go, again, to England.  The day before he sailed he came into his wife’s sitting room, where she lay upon a couch, suffering from a severe headache.

She never mentioned her pain or loneliness, and to Thornton’s careless glance she appeared as she always did—­pale, cold, and self-centred.

“Well, I sail at noon to-morrow!” he said, seating himself astride a chair, folding his arms and settling his chin on them.

“Yes?  Is there anything particular that you want me to look after in your absence?”

Meredith barely raised her eyes.  Her pain was intense, but Thornton saw only indifference and an unconscious insolence in the words, tone, and languid glance.

Never before in his life had he been balked and defied and resented as he was by the pretty creature before him.  The devil rose in him—­and generally Thornton rode his devil with courage and control, but suddenly it reared, and he was thrown!

“Do you know,” he said—­and he looked handsome and powerful in his white clothes; he was splendidly correct in every detail—­“there are times when I think you forget that you are my wife.”

“I try to.”  Like all quiet people Meredith could shatter one’s poise at times by her daring.  She looked so small and defiant as she lay there—­so secure!

“Suppose I commanded you to come with me to-morrow?  Made my rightful demand after this hellish year—­what would you do?”

Thornton’s chin projected; his mouth smiled, not pleasantly, and his eyes held Meredith’s with a light that frightened her.  She sat up.

“Of course I should refuse to go with you,” she replied, “and I do not acknowledge any rights of yours except those that I give you.  You apparently overlook the fact that—­I make no claims.”

“Claims?” Thornton laughed, and the sound had a dangerous note that startled Meredith.  “Claims?  Good Lord!  That’s quaintly delicious.  You don’t know men, my dear.  It would be a deed of charity to—­inform you.  Claims, indeed!  You drove me, when you might have held me, and you talk claims.”

“I did not want to hold you—­after I knew that you had never really been mine.”  Meredith’s words were shaken by an emotion beyond Thornton’s comprehension; they further aroused the brute in him.