“I wish you would not go on, then,” she said abruptly.

He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the darkness.

“Not go on—?”

“Call a hansom, please.  I’m tired,” broke from her with a sudden rush of physical weariness.

Instantly his solicitude enveloped her.  The room had been infernally hot—­and then that confounded cigarette smoke—­he had noticed once or twice that she looked pale—­she mustn’t come to another Saturday.  She felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence of his concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in him with a conscious intensity of abandonment.  He put her in the hansom, and her hand stole into his in the darkness.  A tear or two rose, and she let them fall.  It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!

That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the subject of his talk.  He combined a man’s dislike of uncomfortable questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she knew that if he returned to the subject he must have some special reason for doing so.

“You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon.  Did I put the case badly?”

“No—­you put it very well.”

“Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me go on with it?”

She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention deepening her sense of helplessness.

“I don’t think I care to hear such things discussed in public.”

“I don’t understand you,” he exclaimed.  Again the feeling that his surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude.  She was not sure that she understood herself.

“Won’t you explain?” he said with a tinge of impatience.

Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the scene of so many of their evening confidences.  The shaded lamps, the quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers scattered here and there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of her first marriage had been passed—­a wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in “statuary marble” between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room.  It was a room with which she had never been able to establish any closer relation than that between a traveller and a railway station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which stood for her deepest affinities—­the room for which she had left that other room—­she was startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity.  The prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper significances of life.

Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.

“I don’t know that I can explain,” she faltered.