Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night, beside her husband, as into a sheltering darkness where she could muffle herself and draw breath.  She had stood for the previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake.  For what she was most immediately feeling was that she had, in the past, been active, for these people, to ends that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop.  She but brooded, at first, in her corner of the carriage:  it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen through the window of the brougham, a world mercifully unconscious and unreproachful.  It wouldn’t, like the world she had just left, know sooner or later what she had done, or would know it, at least, only if the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity.  She fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction; and when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman in the act of playing his inquisitive flash over an opposite house-front, she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that she might protest, not less quickly, against mere blind terror.  It had become, for the occasion, preposterously, terror—­of which she must shake herself free before she could properly measure her ground.  The perception of this necessity had in truth soon aided her; since she found, on trying, that, lurid as her prospect might hover there, she could none the less give it no name.  The sense of seeing was strong in her, but she clutched at the comfort of not being sure of what she saw.  Not to know what it would represent on a longer view was a help, in turn, to not making out that her hands were embrued; since if she had stood in the position of a producing cause she should surely be less vague about what she had produced.  This, further, in its way, was a step toward reflecting that when one’s connection with any matter was too indirect to be traced it might be described also as too slight to be deplored.  By the time they were nearing Cadogan Place she had in fact recognised that she couldn’t be as curious as she desired without arriving at some conviction of her being as innocent.  But there had been a moment, in the dim desert of Eaton Square, when she broke into speech.

“It’s only their defending themselves so much more than they need—­it’s only that that makes me wonder.  It’s their having so remarkably much to say for themselves.”

Her husband had, as usual, lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation.  “You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?” To which, as she made no answer, the Colonel added:  “What in the world did you ever suppose was going to happen?  The man’s in a position in which he has nothing in life to do.”