And, the smile still on his lips, he lay back watching the flies wheeling and chasing round the hanging-lamp.  Sixteen of them there were, wheeling and chasing—­never still!

XII

When, walking from Lennan’s studio, Olive reentered her dark little hall, she approached its alcove and glanced first at the hat-stand.  They were all there—­the silk hat, the bowler, the straw!  So he was in!  And within each hat, in turn, she seemed to see her husband’s head—­with the face turned away from her—­so distinctly as to note the leathery look of the skin of his cheek and neck.  And she thought:  “I pray that he will die!  It is wicked, but I pray that he will die!” Then, quietly, that he might not hear, she mounted to her bedroom.  The door into his dressing-room was open, and she went to shut it.  He was standing there at the window.

“Ah!  You’re in!  Been anywhere?”

“To the National Gallery.”

It was the first direct lie she had ever told him, and she was surprised to feel neither shame nor fear, but rather a sense of pleasure at defeating him.  He was the enemy, all the more the enemy because she was still fighting against herself, and, so strangely, in his behalf.

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Rather boring, wasn’t it?  I should have thought you’d have got young Lennan to take you there.”

“Why?”

By instinct she had seized on the boldest answer; and there was nothing to be told from her face.  If he were her superior in strength, he was her inferior in quickness.

He lowered his eyes, and said: 

“His line, isn’t it?”

With a shrug she turned away and shut the door.  She sat down on the edge of her bed, very still.  In that little passage of wits she had won, she could win in many such; but the full hideousness of things had come to her.  Lies! lies!  That was to be her life!  That; or to say farewell to all she now cared for, to cause despair not only in herself, but in her lover, and—­for what?  In order that her body might remain at the disposal of that man in the next room—­her spirit having flown from him for ever.  Such were the alternatives, unless those words:  “Then come to me,” were to be more than words.  Were they?  Could they be?  They would mean such happiness if—­if his love for her were more than a summer love?  And hers for him?  Was it—­were they—­more than summer loves?  How know?  And, without knowing, how give such pain to everyone?  How break a vow she had thought herself quite above breaking?  How make such a desperate departure from all the traditions and beliefs in which she had been brought up!  But in the very nature of passion is that which resents the intrusion of hard and fast decisions. . . .  And suddenly she thought:  If our love cannot stay what it is, and if I cannot yet go to him for always, is there not still another way?