She stood gazing at him, but she was as one of whom he took no account.  He turned to the desk and began to write with a deliberation all the more terrible to her because of the white anger he felt.  And still she stood.  He pressed the button on his desk, and Starling responded.

“I want a man from the stable to be ready to take some letters to town in half an hour,” he said.

It was not until then that she turned and slowly left the room.  A mortal sickness seemed to invade her vitals, and she went to her own chamber and flung herself, face downward, on the lace covering of the bed:  and the sobs that shook her were the totterings of the foundations of her universe.  For a while, in the intensity of her anguish, all thought was excluded.  Presently, however, when the body was spent, the mind began to practise its subtle and intolerable torture, and she was invaded by a sense of loneliness colder than the space between the worlds.

Where was she to go, whither flee, now that his wrath was turned against her?  On the strength of his love alone she had pinned her faith, discarded and scorned all other help.  And at the first contact with that greater power which he had taught her so confidently to despise, that strength had broken!

Slowly, she gazed back over the path she had trod; where roses once had held up smiling heads.  It was choked now by brambles that scratched her nakedness at every step.  Ah, how easily she had been persuaded to enter it!  “We have the right to happiness,” he had said, and she had looked into his eyes and believed him.  What was this strange, elusive happiness, that she had so pantingly pursued and never overtaken? that essence pure and unalloyed with baser things?  Ecstasy, perhaps, she had found—­for was it delirium?  Fear was the boon companion of these; or better, the pestilence that stalked behind them, ever ready to strike.

Then, as though some one had turned on a light—­a sickening, yet penetrating blue light—­she looked at Hugh Chiltern.  She did not wish to look, but that which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger than she.  She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on.  And scan as she would, no traces of the vaunted illimitable power that is called love could she discern.  Love he possessed; that she had not doubted, and did not doubt, even now.  But it had been given her to see that these springs had existed before love had come, and would flow, perchance, after it had departed.  Now she understood his anger; it was like the anger of a fiercely rushing river striving to break a dam and invade the lands below with devastating floods.  All these months the waters had been mounting . . . .