"You lie!"
She was so startled—the thing was so incredible—that, thinking she had not heard aright, she turned towards him and said:
"What, Cecil?"
He called again, distinctly:
"I say you lied. What you said just now was a lie."
Then, his arms still on the table, his shoulders hunched, he began sipping a fresh glass of wine, staring moodily before him, with a sort of vacant, bovine ferocity in his fixed eyes.
Every one has noticed how some trivial fact always imprints itself indelibly on one's mind in such ghastly moments. Opposite Sophy sat the beautiful Duchess of Maidsdowne. As Chesney shouted his insult at his wife, the blood rushed in a scarlet wave to the roots of the Duchess's chestnut hair, and the lovely, violent crimson glowed, painfully over-brilliant, on her cheeks for the rest of the evening. This agonised blush was the one thing that Sophy could ever clearly recall of the moments that followed. All went black about her the next instant; then her will conquered, and she sat still, and conscious, but all that she was conscious of was that the Duchess of Maidsdowne had blushed crimson, and that this crimson still dyed her lovely face. Sophy had heard that she was consumptive and that she rouged to conceal her illness. Now she kept thinking, "No. She does not rouge. I must remember to tell Olive. She does not rouge at all. What a wonderful colour. And how it rushed up to the very edge of her hair."
Next there came over her another strange feeling which also every one is familiar with. She felt that she was in one of those dreams, wherein one finds oneself on the street or in a crowded assembly, insufficiently clad, for every one to stare and wonder at.
Beside her sat Amaldi, no paler than some others at that table, yet realising how much worse than death it is to love a woman whose husband insults her, and yet, for the sake of that very woman, to be unable to avenge the insult.
Before the company could assume more than a strained semblance of naturalness, those guests who had gone out to vote in the division, returned. One of them, a sporting member, a good-natured but typically John Bullish type of M. P. and a country neighbour of John Arundel's, called out as he took his seat: