But it is over now.  I have done with Carlotta.  If she thinks I am going to sit and let the wind which comes over Primrose Hill drive me mad like Gastibelza, l’homme a la carabine, in Victor Hugo’s poem, she is vastly mistaken.  From this hour henceforth I swear she is nothing to me; I will eat and sleep and laugh as if she had never existed.  Polyphemus, curled up in Carlotta’s old place on the sofa, regards me with his sardonic eye.  He is an evil, incredulous, mocking beast, who a few centuries ago would have been burned with his late mistress

I am sane and happier now that I have come to my irrevocable determination.

To-morrow I go to Judith.

CHAPTER XIX

November 10th.

I had to ring twice before Judith’s servant opened the flat door.

“Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus.”

“Ask her if I can come in and wait, as I have something of importance to say to her.”

She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never before occurred to me in Judith’s establishment, and presently returned with her answer.  Would I mind waiting in the dining-room?  I entered.  The table was littered with sheets of her statistical work and odd bits of silk’ and lining.  A type-writer stood at one end and a sewing-machine at the other.  On the writing-desk by the window, in the midst of a mass of letters and account-books, rested a large bowl filled with magnificent blooms of white and yellow chrysanthemums.  A volume of Dante lay open face downwards on the corner.  It did my heart good to see this untidiness, so characteristic of Judith, so familiar, so intimate.  She had taken her trouble bravely, I reflected.  The ordinary daily task had not been left undone.  Through all she had preserved her valiant sanity.  I felt rebuked for my own loss of self-control.

I was about to turn away from the litter of the desk, when my eye caught sight of an envelope bearing a French stamp and addressed in Pasquale’s unmistakable handwriting.  As there seemed to be a letter inside, I did not take it up to examine it more closely.  The glance was enough to assure me that it came from Pasquale.  Why should he be corresponding with Judith?  I walked away puzzled.  Was it a justification, a confession, a plea to her as my friend to obtain my forgiveness?  If there is one thing more irritating than another it is to light accidentally upon a mystery affecting oneself in a friend’s correspondence.  One can no more probe deeply into it than one can steal the friend’s spoons.  It seems an indiscretion to have noticed it, an unpardonable impertinence to subject it to conjecture.  In spite of my abhorring the impulse of curiosity, the sweeping, flaunting, swaggering handwriting of Pasquale worried me.

Judith came in, looking much as she had done on the occasion of my last visit, worn and anxious, with a strange expression in her eyes.