"But what shall I tell him?"
"The truth; that I will not sit down to eat with a murderer."
She vanished from the room, leaving her husband alone. Dr. Ashton's step was already upon the stair, and however keenly Mrs. Fenton might feel the wickedness of the Doctor in not preventing Frontier's self-destruction, the action was too strictly in accord with Arthur's own views to allow of his condemning it. His friend found him in a state of confusion which instantly connected itself in the guest's mind with the non-appearance of Edith, an impression which was strengthened by the lameness of the excuses tendered for her absence. Dr. Ashton not unnaturally concluded that he had just escaped stumbling upon a family quarrel. He accepted whatever his host chose to say, and the two proceeded rather gloomily to dinner.
In Arthur's mind there sprang an irritation against both his wife and his friend. His instincts were all protective, that term including comfort as well as self-preservation. He was intensely annoyed at his wife's attitude, and began to vent his spleen in cynical speeches, which since his marriage had been rare with him.
"Christian grace," he declared, "is exactly like milk; excellent and nourishing while it is fresh, but hard to get pure, and even then sure to sour."
"Say something more original if you are cross, Arthur," observed his friend good humoredly. "What is the matter? Is it a new rug or a Japanese bronze you are dying for?"
"Hang rugs and bronzes," retorted Arthur, with a vicious determination to be ill-natured. "If I can get the necessities of life, I am lucky."
"Nonsense," was the reply. "It isn't that. The lack of the necessities of life makes a man sad; it is the lack of luxuries that makes him cynical."
Dr. Ashton was perfectly right in his inward comment that Fenton was secretly regretting his marriage. This was the thought that filled Arthur's mind. It was true he had had no absolute disagreement with his wife, although it is not impossible that it might have come to this, had a delay in the guest's arrival allowed time. But it filled the husband with an unreasoning rage that Edith presumed to establish so strict a code of morals. He felt that her position as his wife demanded more conformity to his standards. Why need she trouble herself about that which did not concern her, and sit in such lofty judgment upon the morals of her neighbors? Did she propose keeping Dr. Ashton's conscience as well as her own—and his? Certainly those whom the husband found worthy his friendship it ill became the wife to stigmatize and avoid. He sat moodily tearing his fish in pieces instead of eating; for the moment wholly forgetting his duty as host.
"If you'll pardon my mentioning it," Dr. Ashton said at length, "you are about as cheerful company as a death's head. You are so melancholy that I am tempted to fling in your face one of my old epigrams; that love is a gay young bachelor who can never be persuaded to marry and settle down."