At eleven o’clock that night a man stood outside the door of Mrs. Bellew’s flat in Chelsea violently ringing the bell.  His face was deathly white, but his little dark eyes sparkled.  The door was opened, and Helen Bellew in evening dress stood there holding a candle in her hand.

“Who are you?  What do you want?”

The man moved into the light.

“Jaspar!  You?  What on earth——­”

“I want to talk.”

“Talk?  Do you know what time it is?”

“Time—­there’s no such thing.  You might give me a kiss after two years.  I’ve been drinking, but I’m not drunk.”

Mrs. Bellew did not kiss him, neither did she draw back her face.  No trace of alarm showed in her ice-grey eyes.  She said:  “If I let you in, will you promise to say what you want to say quickly, and go away?”

The little brown devils danced in Bellew’s face.  He nodded.  They stood by the hearth in the sitting-room, and on the lips of both came and went a peculiar smile.

It was difficult to contemplate too seriously a person with whom one had lived for years, with whom one had experienced in common the range of human passion, intimacy, and estrangement, who knew all those little daily things that men and women living together know of each other, and with whom in the end, without hatred, but because of one’s nature, one had ceased to live.  There was nothing for either of them to find out, and with a little smile, like the smile of knowledge itself, Jaspar Bellew and Helen his wife looked at each other.

“Well,” she said again; “what have you come for?”

Bellew’s face had changed.  Its expression was furtive; his mouth twitched; a furrow had come between his eyes.

“How—­are—­you?” he said in a thick, muttering voice.

Mrs. Bellew’s clear voice answered: 

“Now, Jaspar, what is it that you want?”

The little brown devils leaped up again in Jaspar’s face.

“You look very pretty to-night!”

His wife’s lips curled.

“I’m much the same as I always was,” she said.

A violent shudder shook Bellew.  He fixed his eyes on the floor a little beyond her to the left; suddenly he raised them.  They were quite lifeless.

“I’m perfectly sober,” he murmured thickly; then with startling quickness his eyes began to sparkle again.  He came a step nearer.

“You’re my wife!” he said.

Mrs. Bellew smiled.

“Come,” she answered, “you must go!” and she put out her bare arm to push him back.  But Bellew recoiled of his own accord; his eyes were fixed again on the floor a little beyond her to the left.

“What’s that?” he stammered.  “What’s that—­that black——?”

The devilry, mockery, admiration, bemusement, had gone out of his face; it was white and calm, and horribly pathetic.

“Don’t turn me out,” he stammered; “don’t turn me out!”