His shoulder went up crossly.
"Oh, they're safe enough," he said grudgingly. "I'll have 'em strung over for you. Counted 'em this morning. They're all there. So you haven't got that against me."
Sophy sat looking down at her hands, and turning her wedding ring slowly round and round. She had never thought that she could come to hate an inanimate object as fiercely as she sometimes hated her wedding ring. But to-day she did not hate it. It seemed a dreary little symbol of a dreary fact that must be borne somehow, that was all. Suddenly she lifted her eyes to his.
"I don't harbour things 'against you,' Cecil," she said. "The pearls were the least of it all. It was the way you spoke of Gerald and that ... that loathsome book." Her look grew suddenly impassioned with resentment. "Why should you wish to show me such a thing?" she asked very low, and her voice trembled.
Chesney was deeply embarrassed again. He looked away from her, and that slow red rose in his face.
"Oh—men are hell!" he said thickly. "You'd never really understand a man, Sophy. There are abysms ... cess-pools in us."
He got up suddenly and flung himself on his knees beside her, hiding his face in her lap like a child.
"Don't try to understand," she heard him muttering. "Just try to ... to forgive."
There was something at once piteous and repulsive, in that huge figure crouching so humbly at her knee.
Sophy felt a choking sensation.