Louise scuttled by past him to her mistress's vacated rooms. She did not see him and he heard that she muttered under her breath: "Ah! par exemple! C'est trop fort, ma parole d'honneur!"
As Karen came back from the door he went to meet her.
"Karen," he said, "will you come and talk with me, now?"
She put aside his hand. "I cannot talk. Do not come to me," she said. "I must think." And going into their room she shut the door.
CHAPTER XXVI
The telephone sounded while Gregory next morning ate his solitary breakfast, and the voice of Mrs. Forrester, disembodied of all but its gravity, asked him, if he would, to come and see her immediately.
Gregory asked if Madame von Marwitz were with her. He was not willing, after the final affront that she had put upon him, to encounter Madame von Marwitz again in circumstances where he might seem to be justifying himself. But, with a deeper drop, the disembodied voice informed him that Madame von Marwitz, ten minutes before, had driven to the station on her way to Cornwall. "You will understand, I think, Gregory," said Mrs. Forrester, "that it is hardly possible for her to face in London, as yet, the situation that you have made for her."
Gregory, to this, replied, shortly, that he would come to her at once, reserving his comments on the imputed blame.
He had passed an almost sleepless night, lying in his little dressing-room bed where, by a tacit agreement, never explicitly recognized, he had slept, now, for so many nights. Cold fears, shaped at last in definite forms, stood round him and bade him see the truth. His wife did not love him. From the beginning he had been as nothing to her compared with her guardian. The pale, hard light of her eyes as she had said to him that afternoon, "Speak!" seemed to light the darkness with bitter revelations. He knew that he was what would be called, sentimentally, a broken-hearted man; but it seemed that the process of breaking had been gradual; so that now, when his heart lay in pieces, his main feeling was not of sharp pain but of dull fatigue, not of tragic night, but of a grey commonplace from which all sunlight had slowly ebbed away.