Further than that he could not understand her.  The suddenness and cruelty of the blow had brutalised his imagination.

He got up and stretched himself, to shake off the oppression that weighed on him like an unwholesome sleep.  As he rose he felt a queer feeling in his head, a giddiness, a sense of obstruction in his brain.  He went into the dining-room, and poured himself out a small quantity of whiskey, measuring it with the accuracy of abstemious habit.  The dose had become necessary since his nerves had been unhinged by worry and the shock of Peggy’s death.  This time he drank it almost undiluted.

He felt better.  The stimulant had jogged something in his brain and cleared it.

He went back into the study and began to think.  He remained thinking for some time, consecutively, and with great lucidity.  He asked himself what he was to do now, and he saw clearly that he could do nothing.  If Anne had been a passionate woman, hurling her words in a fury of fierce grief, he would have thought no more of it.  If she had been the tender, tearful sort, dropping words in a weak, helpless misery, he would have thought no more of it.  He could imagine poor little Maggie saying a thing like that, not knowing what she said.  If it had been poor little Maggie he could have drawn her to him and comforted her, and reasoned with her till he had made her see the senselessness of her idea.  Maggie would have listened to reason—­his reason.  Anne never would.

She had been cold and slow, and implacably deliberate.  It was not blind instinct, but illuminated reason that had told her what to say and when to say it.  Nothing he could ever do or say would make her take back her words.  And if she took back her words, her thought would remain indestructible.  She would never give it up; she would never approach him without it; she would never forget that it was there.  It would always rise up between them, unburied, unappeased.

His brain swam and clouded again.  He went again to the dining-room and drank more whiskey.  Kate was in the dining-room and she saw him drinking.  He saw Kate looking at him; but he didn’t care.  He was past caring for what anybody might think of him.

His brain was clearer than ever now.  He realised Anne’s omnipotence to harm him.  He saw the hard, imperishable divinity in her.  His wife was a spiritual woman.  He had not always known what that meant.  But he knew now; and now for the first time in his life he judged her.  For the first time in his life his heart rose in a savage revolt against her power.

His head grew hot.  The air of the study was stifling.  He opened the window and went out into the cool, dark garden.  He paced up and down, heedless of where he trod, trampling the flowerless plants down into their black beds.  At the end of the path a little circle of white stones glimmered in the dark.  That was Peggy’s garden.

An agony of love and grief shook him as he thought of the dead child.