Cecily made no reply.  Her anger had involved her in an inconsistency, yet she was not so far at the mercy of blind impulses as to right herself by taking the very course she had recognized as impossible.

“That entirely depends,” added Elgar, “on whether you choose to explain your absence last night.”

“In other words,” said Cecily, “it can be of no significance to me where you go or what you do, but if you have a doubt about any of my movements, it at once raises the question whether you can continue to live with me or not I refuse to admit anything of the kind.  I have chosen, as you put it, to remain in your house, and in doing so I know what I accept.  By what right do you demand more of me than I of you?”

“You know that you are talking absurdly.  You know as well as I do the difference.”

“Whatever laws I recognize, they are in myself only.  As regards your claims upon me, what I have said is the simple truth.  I owe you no account.  If you are not content with this, you must form whatever suppositions you will, and act as you think fit.”

“That is as much as telling me that our married life is at an end.  I suppose you meant that when you kindly reminded me that it was your money I have been living on.  Very well.  Let it be as you wish.”

Cecily regarded him with resentful wonder.

“Do you dare to speak as if it were I who had brought this about?”

Reuben was not the man to act emotion and contrive scenes.  Whenever it might have seemed that he did so, he was, in truth, yielding to the sudden revulsions which were characteristic of his passionate nature.  In him, harshness and unreason inevitably led to a reaction in which all the softer of his qualities rose predominant.  So it was now.  Those last words of his were not consciously meant to give him an opportunity of changing his standpoint.  Inconstant, incapable of self-direction, at the mercy of the moment’s will, he could foresee himself just as little as another could foresee him.  His impetuous being prompted him to utter sincerely what a man of adroit insincerity would have spoken with calculation.

“Yes,” he exclaimed. “it is you who have done most towards it!”

“By what act? what word?” she asked, in astonishment.

“By all your acts and words for the year past, and longer.  You had practically abandoned me long before you went abroad.  When you discovered that I was not everything you imagined, when you found faults and weaknesses in me, you began to draw away, to be cold and indifferent, to lose all interest in whatever I did or wished to do.  When I was working, you showed plainly that you had no faith in my powers; it soon cost you an effort even to listen to me when I talked on the subject.  I looked to you for help, and I found none.  Could I say anything?  The help had to come spontaneously, or it was no use.  Then you gave yourself up entirely to the child; you