One day, when he had brought her some flowers, she put them away from her with a slight unusual sign of impatience.
"Don't bring me any more," she said.
Her husband looked at her intently. "You don't care for them?"
"No."
"I thought," he said, a little mortification struggling with natural disappointment in his breast, "that I had heard you say you liked them—or, at any rate, that you liked me to bring them——"
"That was long ago," she answered softly, but coldly. She lay with her eyes closed, her face very pale and weary.
"One would think," he went on, spurred by puzzled anger to put a long unspoken thought into bare words, "that you did not care for me now—that you did not love me any longer?"
She opened her eyes and looked at him steadily. There was something almost like pity in her face.
"I am afraid it is true, Sydney. I am very sorry."
He stood staring at her a little longer, as if he could not believe his ears. The red blood slowly mounted to his forehead. She returned his gaze with the same look of almost wistful pity, in which there was an aloofness, a coldness, that showed him as nothing else had ever done the extent of her estrangement from himself. Somehow he felt as though she had struck him on the lips. He walked away from her without another word, and shut himself into his study, where he sat for some minutes at his writing-table, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing, dumbly conscious that he was, on the whole, more wretched than he had ever been in the course of a fairly prosperous and successful life.