Her cry rang through the room.

’Call them up—­let them come and look at you and hear what you are.  Soon enough every one will know.  Where were you this afternoon?  You were watched every step of the way from here to that place where you have made yourself a base, vile, unclean creature—.’

‘I am not that!  Your spies have misled you.’

’Misled?  Didn’t you go to that man Barfoot’s door and knock there?  And because you were disappointed, didn’t you wait about, and go there a second time?’

‘What if I did?  It doesn’t mean what you think.’

’What?  You go time after time to the private chambers of an unmarried man—­a man such as that—­and it means no harm?’

‘I have never been there before.’

‘You expect me to believe you?’ Widdowson cried with savage contumely.  He had just loosed his hold of her, and she was upright again before him, her eyes flashing defiance, though every muscle in her frame quivered.  ’When did your lies begin?  Was it when you told me you had been to hear Miss Barfoot’s lecture, and never went there at all?’

He aimed the charge at a venture, and her face told him that his suspicion had been grounded.

’For how many weeks, for how many months, have you been dishonouring me and yourself?’

’I am not guilty of what you believe, but I shan’t try to defend myself.  Thank Heaven, this is the end of everything between us!  Charge me with what you like.  I am going away from you, and I hope we may never meet again.’

’Yes, you are going—­no doubt of that.  But not before you have answered my questions.  Whether with lies or not doesn’t matter much.  You shall give your own account of what you have been doing.’

Both panting as if after some supreme effort of their physical force, they stood and looked at each other.  Each to the other’s eyes was incredibly transformed.  Monica could not have imagined such brutal ferocity in her husband’s face, and she herself had a wild recklessness in her eyes, a scorn and abhorrence in all the lines of her countenance, which made Widdowson feel as if a stranger were before him.

‘I shall answer no question whatever,’ Monica replied.  ’All I want is to leave your house, and never see you again.’

He regretted what he had done.  The result of the first day’s espionage being a piece of evidence so incomplete, he had hoped to command himself until more solid proof of his wife’s guilt were forthcoming.  But jealousy was too strong for such prudence, and the sight of Monica as she uttered her falsehood made a mere madman of him.  Predisposed to believe a story of this kind, he could not reason as he might have done if fear of Barfoot had never entered his thoughts.  The whole course of dishonour seemed so clear; he traced it from Monica’s earliest meetings with Barfoot at Chelsea.  Wavering between the impulse to cast off his wife with every circumstance