“Cecil.”

Honora returned this somewhat unique epistle to her husband, and he crushed it.  There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act, and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message of good-will.  Whatever its wording, such it was.  A dark red flush had mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.

“Well?” he said.

She was fighting for her presence of mind.  Flashes of his temper she had known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing—­his anger.  Not his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him before her very eyes.  She had been able to cope with the new man, but she felt numb and powerless before the resuscitated demon of the old.

“What do you expect me to say, Hugh?” she faltered, with a queer feeling that she was not addressing him.

“Anything you like,” he replied.

“Defend Cecil.”

“Why should I defend him?” she said dully.

“Because you have no pride.”

A few seconds elapsed before the full import and brutality of this insult reached her intelligence, and she cried out his name in a voice shrill with anguish.  But he seemed to delight in the pain he had caused.

“You couldn’t be expected, I suppose, to see that this letter is a d—­d impertinence, filled with an outrageous flippancy, a deliberate affront, an implication that our marriage does not exist.”

She sat stunned, knowing that the real pain would come later.  That which slowly awoke in her now, as he paced the room, was a high sense of danger, and a persistent inability to regard the man who had insulted her as her husband.  He was rather an enemy to them both, and he would overturn, if he could, the frail craft of their happiness in the storm.  She cried out to Hugh as across the waters.

“No,—­I have no pride, Hugh,—­it is gone.  I have thought of you only.  The fear that I might separate you from your family, from your friends, and ruin your future has killed my pride.  He—­Mr. Grainger meant to be kind.  He is always like that—­it’s his way of saying things.  He wishes to show that he is friendly to you—­to me—­”

“In spite of my relations,” cried Chiltern, stopping in the middle of the room.  “They cease to be my relations from this day.  I disown them.  I say it deliberately.  So long as I live, not one of them shall come into this house.  All my life they have begged me to settle down, to come up here and live the life my father did.  Very well, now I’ve done it.  And I wrote to them and told them that I intended to live henceforth like a gentleman and a decent citizen—­more than some of them do.  No, I wash my hands of them.  If they were to crawl up here from the gate on their knees, I’d turn them out.”

Although he could not hear her, she continued to plead.