She was sitting in the chair she always occupied, and was dressed with the accustomed perfection.  But her face was an index to the sufferings she had endured this past week.  As soon as the door had closed, she stood to receive him, but not with extended hand.  Her eyes were fixed upon him steadily, and Wilfrid, with difficulty meeting them, experienced a shook of new fear, a kind of fear he could not account for.  Outwardly she was quite calm; it was something in her look, an indefinable suggestion of secret anguish, that impressed him so.  He did not try to take her hand, but, having laid down his hat, came near to her and spoke as quietly as he could.

‘May I speak to you of what passed between us last Monday?’

‘How can we avoid speaking of it?’ she replied, in a low voice, her eyes still searching him.

‘I ought to have come to see you before this,’ Wilfrid continued, taking the seat to which she pointed, whilst she also sat down.  ‘I could not.’

‘I have been expecting you,’ Beatrice said, in an emotionless way.

The nervous tension with which he had come into her presence had yielded to a fit of trembling.  Coldness ran along his veins; his tongue refused its office; his eyes sank before her gaze.

‘I felt sure you would come to-day,’ Beatrice continued, with the same absence of pronounced feeling.  ’If not, I must have gone to your house.  What do you wish to say to me?’

’That which I find it very difficult to say.  I feel that after what happened on Monday we cannot be quite the same to each other.  I fear I said some things that were not wholly true.’

Beatrice seemed to be holding her breath.  Her face was marble.  She sat unmoving.

‘You mean,’ she said at length, ’that those letters represented more than you were willing to confess?’

It was calmly asked.  Evidently Wilfrid had no outbreak of resentment to fear.  He would have preferred it to this dreadful self-command.

‘More,’ he answered, ’than I felt at the time.  I spoke no word of conscious falsehood.’

‘Has anything happened to prove to you what you then denied?’

He looked at her in doubt.  Could she in any way have learnt what had come to pass?  Whilst talking, he had made up his mind to disclose nothing definitely; he would explain his behaviour merely as arising from doubt of himself.  It would make the rest easier for her to bear hereafter.

‘I have read those letters again,’ he answered.

‘And you have learnt that you never loved me?’

He held his eyes down, unable to utter words.  Beatrice also was silent for a long time.  At length she said—­

‘I think you are keeping something from me?’

He raised his face.

‘Has nothing else happened?’ she asked, with measured tone, a little sad, nothing more.

The truth was forced from him, and its utterance gave him a relief which was in itself a source of new agitation.