“You are not afraid on your own account?” Anne asked.

“Oh, no, my lady.  He wouldn’t interfere with me.  It’s your ladyship—­”

“Ah, well,” she said, quietly interrupting, “you need not be afraid for me either.  I shall not go downstairs again to-night.  He will not be expecting me.”

“Very good, my lady.”

Dimsdale looked somewhat relieved but not wholly satisfied.  He lingered as if he longed yet did not dare to say more.

As for Anne, she sat quite motionless gazing into the fire, her hands clasped very tightly before her.  She seemed to have dismissed the subject under discussion and the faithful Dimsdale simultaneously from her mind.

After a few seconds the old butler realised this, and without further ado he removed the tea-things and went quietly away.

Anne did not notice his departure.  She was too deep in thought.  Her brain was steadier now, and she found it possible to think.  For the first time she was asking herself if she would be justified in bringing her long martyrdom to an end.  She had fulfilled her part of the bargain, patiently, conscientiously, unflaggingly, throughout those seven bitter years.  She had married her husband without loving him, and he had never sought to win her love.  He had married her for the sake of conquering her, attracted by the very coldness with which she had tried in her girlhood to repel him.  She had caught his fancy in those far-off days.  Her queenliness, her grace, had captivated him.  And later, with the sheer hunter’s instinct, he had pursued her, and had eventually discovered a means of entrapping her.  He had named his conditions and she had named hers.  In the end he had dispatched the father to Canada and made the daughter his wife.

But his fancy for her had scarcely outlasted his capture.  He had taken pleasure for a while in humiliating her, counting it sport if he succeeded in arousing her rare indignation.  But soon even this had ceased to amuse him.  He had developed into that most odious of all bullies, the domestic tyrant, and had therewith sunk back into those habits of intemperance which his marriage had scarcely interrupted.  He was many years her senior.  He treated her as a slave, and if now and then an uncomfortable sensation of inferiority assailed him, he took his revenge upon her in evil, glowering tempers that rendered him more of a beast than a man.

But yet she had borne with him.  By neither word nor action had she ever voluntarily widened the breach between them:  His growing dislike had not had any visible effect upon her.  She had done her duty faithfully through all, had borne his harshness and his insults in silence, with a patience too majestic, too colossal, for his understanding.

And now for the first time she asked herself, Did he want to be rid of her?  Had he invented this monstrous grievance to drive her from him?  Were the days of her bondage indeed drawing at last to an end?  Had she borne with him long enough?  Was she free—­was she free to go?