‘You do not know how she suffers.  Let me go; spare her the pain.’

’She is not the only one who suffers.  Do you think that I don’t suffer?  I’ve set my heart—­my very life is set on this play.  I must get through with it; they are all waiting for it.  My enemies say I cannot write it, but I shall if you will help me.’

[Illustration:  “Sometimes, in an exciting passage, the hands were clasped.”]

‘Poor Emily’s heart is equally broken.  Her life is equally set——­’ Mrs. Bentley did not finish.  Hubert just caught the words.  Their significance struck him; he looked questioningly into Mrs. Bentley’s eyes; then, pretending not to have understood, he begged her to remain.  With the air of one who yields to a temptation, she came into the room.  He felt strangely happy, and, drawing over an arm-chair for her, he threw himself on the couch.  He noticed that she wore a loose white jacket, and once during the reading of the act he was conscious of a beautiful hand hanging over the rail of the chair.  Sometimes, in an exciting passage, the hands were clasped.  The black slippers and the slender black-stockinged ankles showed beneath the skirt; and when he raised his eyes from the manuscript, he saw the blonde face and hair, and the pale eyes were always fixed upon him.  She listened with a keen and penetrating interest to his criticism of the act, agreeing with him generally, sometimes quietly contesting a point, and with some strange fascination drawing new and unexpected ideas from him; and in the intellectual warmth of her femininity his brain seemed to clear and his ideas took new shape.

‘Ah,’ he said, after two hours’ delightful talk, ’how much I’m indebted to you!  At last I see my mistakes; in two days I shall have written the act.  And he wrote rapidly for nearly two hours, reconstructing the opening scenes of his second act.’  He then threw himself on the couch, smoked a cigar, and after half an hour’s rest continued writing till dinner-time.

When he came down-stairs, the thought of what he had been writing was still so vivid in him that he did not notice at once the silence of those with whom he was dining.  He complimented Mrs. Bentley on the freshness of the turbot; she hardly answered; and then he became aware that something had gone wrong.  What?  Only one thing was possible.  Emily had heard that Mrs. Bentley had been in his study.  Looking from the woman to the girl, he saw that the latter had been weeping.  She was still in a highly hysterical state, and might burst into tears and fly from the dinner-table at any moment.  His face changed expression, and it was with difficulty that he restrained his temper.  His life had been made up of a constant recurrence of these scenes, and he was wholly weary of them; and the thought of the absolute want of reason in the causeless jealousy, and the misery that these little bickerings made of his life, exasperated him beyond measure.  The dinner proceeded in silence,