“Who gave you those pearls?”

She made no answer, but her hand dropped a little consciously.  He had given them to her that afternoon, remarking, with rather questionable taste, that they were “a wedding-present for the second Mrs. Nevill Tyson.”

He leant over her chair and assailed her with questions to which no answer came, to which no answer was possible, punctuating his periods with kisses.

“Are you a conundrum?  Or a fiend?  Or a metaphysical system?  And if so, why do you wear a pink frock!  Are you a young woman who prefers a dead poet to a living husband?  Are you a young woman at all?  Or only a dear little, sweet little, pink little strawberry iceberg?”

He lay down on the sofa as if overcome by unutterable fatigue.  “Just as you like,” he murmured faintly.  “You’ll be sorry for this some day.  Shakespeare is immortal.  I, most unfortunately, am not.”

He got up and threw the window open.  He ramped about the room, soliloquizing as he went.  Never, even in the last days of their engagement, had she seen him so restless. (But she was not going to speak yet; not she!) He stopped before the chimney-piece; it was covered with ridiculous objects, the things that please a child:  there were Swiss cow-bells and stags carved in wood, Chinese idols that wagged their heads, little images of performing cats, teacups, a whole shelf full of toys.  Not one of them but had some minute fragment of his wife’s personality adhering to it.  He remembered the insane impulse that came upon him last year to smash them, sweep the lot of them on to the floor.  To-night he could have kissed them, cried over them.  “T-t-t-tt!  What affecting absurdity!” That was the way he went on.  And now he sat down by her writing-table, and was taking things up and examining them while he talked.  He never, never forgot the expression of a certain brass porcupine that was somehow a penwiper; it seemed to belong to a world gone mad, where everything was something else, where porcupines were penwipers, and his wife—­

For suddenly his tongue had stopped.  He had caught sight of an enormous bunch of hothouse flowers in a vase on the floor by the writing-table.  Stanistreet’s card was in the midst of the bunch, and a note from Stanistreet lay open on the writing-table.

There was an ominous pause while Tyson read it.  It was curt enough; only an offer of flowers and a ticket for the “Lyceum.”  Stanistreet’s mind must have been seriously off its balance, otherwise he would never have done this clumsy thing.

Tyson strode to his wife’s chair and tossed the letter into her lap.

“How long has Stanistreet been paying you these little attentions?”

She looked up smiling.  I am not sure that she did not think this new tone of Tyson’s was part of the game they were playing together.  She had never taken him seriously.

“Ever since he found out that I liked them, I suppose.”