Pierson stared at her, and gripped the back of the chair he had been sitting in.  A lifetime of repression served him in the half-realised horror of that moment.  He stammered out the single word—­

“Nollie!”

“It’s quite true,” she said, turned round, and went out.

Pierson had a sort of vertigo; if he had moved, he must have fallen down.  Nollie!  He slid round and sank into his chair, and by some horrible cruel fiction of his nerves, he seemed to feel Noel on his knee, as, when a little girl, she had been wont to sit, with her fair hair fluffing against his cheek.  He seemed to feel that hair tickling his skin; it used to be the greatest comfort he had known since her mother died.  At that moment his pride shrivelled like a flower held to a flame; all that abundant secret pride of a father who loves and admires, who worships still a dead wife in the children she has left him; who, humble by nature, yet never knows how proud he is till the bitter thing happens; all the long pride of the priest who, by dint of exhortation and remonstrance has coated himself in a superiority he hardly suspects—­all this pride shrivelled in him.  Then something writhed and cried within, as a tortured beast cries, at loss to know why it is being tortured.  How many times has not a man used those words:  “My God!  My God!  Why hast Thou forsaken me!” He sprang up and tried to pace his way out of this cage of confusion:  His thoughts and feelings made the strangest medley, spiritual and worldly—­Social ostracism—­her soul in peril—­a trial sent by God!  The future!  Imagination failed him.  He went to his little piano, opened it, closed it again; took his hat, and stole out.  He walked fast, without knowing where.  It was very cold—­a clear, bitter evening.  Silent rapid motion in the frosty air was some relief.  As Noel had fled from him, having uttered her news, so did he fly from her.  The afflicted walk fast.  He was soon down by the river, and turned West along its wall.  The moon was up, bright and nearly full, and the steel-like shimmer of its light burnished the ebbing water.  A cruel night!  He came to the Obelisk, and leaned against it, overcome by a spasm of realisation.  He seemed to see his dead wife’s face staring at him out of the past, like an accusation.  “How have you cared for Nollie, that she should have come to this?” It became the face of the moonlit sphinx, staring straight at him, the broad dark face with wide nostrils, cruel lips, full eyes blank of pupils, all livened and whitened by the moonlight—­an embodiment of the marvellous unseeing energy of Life, twisting and turning hearts without mercy.  He gazed into those eyes with a sort of scared defiance.  The great clawed paws of the beast, the strength and remorseless serenity of that crouching creature with human head, made living by his imagination and the moonlight, seemed to him like a temptation to deny God, like a refutation of human virtue.