had been wilfully destroyed.  Anger seized him, and he rushed into Mildred’s room.  It was dark and empty.  When he had got a light he saw that she had taken away all her things and the baby’s (he had noticed on entering that the go-cart was not in its usual place on the landing, but thought Mildred had taken the baby out;) and all the things on the washing-stand had been broken, a knife had been drawn cross-ways through the seats of the two chairs, the pillow had been slit open, there were large gashes in the sheets and the counterpane, the looking-glass appeared to have been broken with a hammer.  Philip was bewildered.  He went into his own room, and here too everything was in confusion.  The basin and the ewer had been smashed, the looking-glass was in fragments, and the sheets were in ribands.  Mildred had made a slit large enough to put her hand into the pillow and had scattered the feathers about the room.  She had jabbed a knife into the blankets.  On the dressing-table were photographs of Philip’s mother, the frames had been smashed and the glass shivered.  Philip went into the tiny kitchen.  Everything that was breakable was broken, glasses, pudding-basins, plates, dishes.

It took Philip’s breath away.  Mildred had left no letter, nothing but this ruin to mark her anger, and he could imagine the set face with which she had gone about her work.  He went back into the sitting-room and looked about him.  He was so astonished that he no longer felt angry.  He looked curiously at the kitchen-knife and the coal-hammer, which were lying on the table where she had left them.  Then his eye caught a large carving-knife in the fireplace which had been broken.  It must have taken her a long time to do so much damage.  Lawson’s portrait of him had been cut cross-ways and gaped hideously.  His own drawings had been ripped in pieces; and the photographs, Manet’s Olympia and the Odalisque of Ingres, the portrait of Philip IV, had been smashed with great blows of the coal-hammer.  There were gashes in the table-cloth and in the curtains and in the two arm-chairs.  They were quite ruined.  On one wall over the table which Philip used as his desk was the little bit of Persian rug which Cronshaw had given him.  Mildred had always hated it.

“If it’s a rug it ought to go on the floor,” she said, “and it’s a dirty stinking bit of stuff, that’s all it is.”

It made her furious because Philip told her it contained the answer to a great riddle.  She thought he was making fun of her.  She had drawn the knife right through it three times, it must have required some strength, and it hung now in tatters.  Philip had two or three blue and white plates, of no value, but he had bought them one by one for very small sums and liked them for their associations.  They littered the floor in fragments.  There were long gashes on the backs of his books, and she had taken the trouble to tear pages out of the unbound French ones.  The little ornaments on the chimney-piece lay on the hearth in bits.  Everything that it had been possible to destroy with a knife or a hammer was destroyed.