Henceforward she knew, in practice, what the inevitable, when you have to live with it, may contain of anguish wretched and humiliating.  Her husband was risking his life, so she was absolutely convinced, and she could do nothing; she had come to the bed-rock of Samuel’s character.  She felt that, for the time being, she had a madman in the house, who could not be treated according to ordinary principles.  The continual strain aged her.  Her one source of relief was to talk with Cyril.  She talked to him without reserve, and the words ‘your father,’ ‘your father,’ were everlastingly on her complaining tongue.  Yes, she was utterly changed.  Often she would weep when alone.

Nevertheless she frequently forgot that she had been beaten.  She had no notion of honourable warfare.  She was always beginning again, always firing under a flag of truce; and thus she constituted a very inconvenient opponent.  Samuel was obliged, while hardening on the main point, to compromise on lesser questions.  She too could be formidable, and when her lips took a certain pose, and her eyes glowed, he would have put on forty mufflers had she commanded.  Thus it was she who arranged all the details of the supreme journey to Stafford.  Samuel was to drive to Knype, so as to avoid the rigours of the Loop Line train from Bursley and the waiting on cold platforms.  At Knype he was to take the express, and to travel first-class.

After he was dressed on that gas-lit morning, he learnt bit by bit the extent of her elaborate preparations.  The breakfast was a special breakfast, and he had to eat it all.  Then the cab came, and he saw Amy put hot bricks into it.  Constance herself put goloshes over his boots, not because it was damp, but because indiarubber keeps the feet warm.  Constance herself bandaged his neck, and unbuttoned his waistcoat and stuck an extra flannel under his dickey.  Constance herself warmed his woollen gloves, and enveloped him in his largest overcoat.

Samuel then saw Cyril getting ready to go out.  “Where are you off?” he demanded.

“He’s going with you as far as Knype,” said Constance grimly.  “He’ll see you into the train and then come back here in the cab.”

She had sprung this indignity upon him.  She glared.  Cyril glanced with timid bravado from one to the other.  Samuel had to yield.

Thus in the winter darkness—­for it was not yet dawn—­Samuel set forth to the trial, escorted by his son.  The reverberation of his appalling cough from the cab was the last thing that Constance heard.

During most of the day Constance sat in ‘Miss Insull’s corner’ in the shop.  Twenty years ago this very corner had been hers.  But now, instead of large millinery-boxes enwrapped in brown paper, it was shut off from the rest of the counter by a rich screen of mahogany and ground-glass, and within the enclosed space all the apparatus necessary to the activity of Miss Insull had been provided for.