“Ah, my dear, I want nothing, except not to have to feel like this.”

“What do you feel like?”

“Like what I am.  A stranger in my husband’s house.”

“And is that my fault?” he asked gently.

“It is not mine.  But there it is.  I feel sometimes as if I’d never been married to you.  That’s why you must never talk to me as you did just now.”

“Good God, what a thing to say!”

He hid his face in his hands.  The pain she had inflicted would have been unbearable but for the light that was in him.

He rose to leave her.  But before he left, he took one long, scrutinising look at her.  It struck him that she was not, at the moment, entirely responsible for her utterances.  And again his light helped him.

“Look here,” said he, “I don’t think you’re feeling very well.  This isn’t exactly a joyous life for you.”

“I want no other,” said she.

“You don’t know what you want.  You’re overstrained—­frightfully—­and you ought to have a long rest and a change.  You’re too good, you know, to my little sister.  I’ve told you before that I won’t allow you to sacrifice yourself to her.  I shall get some one to come and stay, and I shall take you down this week to the south coast, or wherever you like to go.  It’ll do you all the good in the world to get away from this beastly place for a month or two.”

“It’ll do me no good to get away from poor Edie.”

“It will, dearest, it will, really.”

“It will not.  If you go and take me away from Edie I shall get ill myself.”

“You only think so because you’re ill already.”

“I am not ill.”  She turned to him her sombre, tragic face.  “Walter—­whatever you do, don’t ask me to leave Edie, for I can’t.”

“Why not?” he asked gently.

“Because I love her.  And it’s—­it’s the only thing.”

“I see,” he said; and left her.

He went back to Edith.  She smiled at his disarray and enquired the cause of it.  He entertained her with an account of his labours.

“How funny you must both have looked,” said Edith, “and, oh, how funny the poor drawing-room must feel.”

“The fact is,” said Majendie gravely, “I don’t think she’s very well.  I shall get her to see Gardner.”

“I would, if I were you.”

He wrote to Dr. Gardner that night and told Anne what he had done.  She was indignant, and expounded his anxiety as one more instance of his failure to understand her nature.  But she did not refuse to receive the doctor when he called the next morning.

When Majendie came back from the office he found his wife calm, but disposed to a terrifying reticence on the subject of her health.  “It’s nothing—­nothing,” she said; and that was all the answer she would give him.  In the evening he went round to Thurston Square to get the truth out of Gardner.