in mire.  Moreover, he no longer chastised her when she came.  His ideals had left him, one by one; he now lived alone, immune from dignity and shame, soothing himself with whisky.  A man of rancour, meet for pity, and, in his cups, contented.  He had lunched freely before coming to Blanca’s Christmas function, but by four o’clock, the gases which had made him feel the world a pleasant place had nearly all evaporated, and he was suffering from a wish to drink again.  Or it may have been that this girl, with her soft look, gave him the feeling that she ought to have belonged to him; and as she did not, he felt, perhaps, a natural irritation that she belonged, or might belong, to somebody else.  Or, again, it was possibly his natural male distaste for the works of women painters which induced an awkward frame of mind.

Two days later in a daily paper over no signature, appeared this little paragraph:  “We learn that ‘The Shadow,’ painted by Bianca Stone, who is not generally known to be the wife of the writer, Mr. Hilary Dallison, will soon be exhibited at the Bencox Gallery.  This very ‘fin-de-siecle’ creation, with its unpleasant subject, representing a woman (presumably of the streets) standing beneath a gas-lamp, is a somewhat anaemic piece of painting.  If Mr. Dallison, who finds the type an interesting one, embodies her in one of his very charming poems, we trust the result will be less bloodless.”

The little piece of green-white paper containing this information was handed to Hilary by his wife at breakfast.  The blood mounted slowly in his cheeks.  Bianca’s eyes fastened themselves on that flush.  Whether or no—­as philosophers say—­little things are all big with the past, of whose chain they are the latest links, they frequently produce what apparently are great results.

The marital relations of Hilary and his wife, which till then had been those of, at all events, formal conjugality, changed from that moment.  After ten o’clock at night their lives became as separate as though they lived in different houses.  And this change came about without expostulations, reproach, or explanation, just by the turning of a key; and even this was the merest symbol, employed once only, to save the ungracefulness of words.  Such a hint was quite enough for a man like Hilary, whose delicacy, sense of the ridiculous, and peculiar faculty of starting back and retiring into himself, put the need of anything further out of the question.  Both must have felt, too, that there was nothing that could be explained.  An anonymous double entendre was not precisely evidence on which to found a rupture of the marital tie.  The trouble was so much deeper than that—­the throbbing of a woman’s wounded self-esteem, of the feeling that she was no longer loved, which had long cried out for revenge.