Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the carpet.

“You have ceased to take this view, then?” he said as she broke off.  “You no longer believe that husbands and wives are justified in separating—­under such conditions?”

“Under such conditions?” she stammered.  “Yes—­I still believe that—­but how can we judge for others?  What can we know of the circumstances—?”

He interrupted her.  “I thought it was a fundamental article of our creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage were not to interfere with the full assertion of individual liberty.”  He paused a moment.  “I thought that was your reason for leaving Arment.”

She flushed to the forehead.  It was not like him to give a personal turn to the argument.

“It was my reason,” she said simply.

“Well, then—­why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?”

“I don’t—­I don’t—­I only say that one can’t judge for others.”

He made an impatient movement.  “This is mere hair-splitting.  What you mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose when you needed it, you now repudiate it.”

“Well,” she exclaimed, flushing again, “what if I do?  What does it matter to us?”

Westall rose from his chair.  He was excessively pale, and stood before his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.

“It matters to me,” he said in a low voice, “because I do not repudiate it.”

“Well—?”

“And because I had intended to invoke it as”—­

He paused and drew his breath deeply.  She sat silent, almost deafened by her heart-beats.—­“as a complete justification of the course I am about to take.”

Julia remained motionless.  “What course is that?” she asked.

He cleared his throat.  “I mean to claim the fulfilment of your promise.”

For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered a torturing acuteness of vision.  Every detail of her surroundings pressed upon her:  the tick of the clock, the slant of sunlight on the wall, the hardness of the chair-arms that she grasped, were a separate wound to each sense.

“My promise—­” she faltered.

“Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one or the other should wish to be released.”

She was silent again.  He waited a moment, shifting his position nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability:  “You acknowledge the agreement?”

The question went through her like a shock.  She lifted her head to it proudly.  “I acknowledge the agreement,” she said.

“And—­you don’t mean to repudiate it?”

A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced and pushed it back.

“No,” she answered slowly, “I don’t mean to repudiate it.”

There was a pause.  He remained near the hearth, his elbow resting on the mantel-shelf.  Close to his hand stood a little cup of jade that he had given her on one of their wedding anniversaries.  She wondered vaguely if he noticed it.