She ran upstairs and into the small double bedroom. It contained two beds, and for the first time since their marriage she and Horace had occupied separate ones.
To-night Elsie felt that she could never be thankful enough for the comparative solitude that would enable her to feel herself free again.
She tore off her thin summer clothes, shook down her cloud of hair, ran across the room in her nightdress to snap off the light, and then almost threw herself into bed.
In the blessed darkness, Elsie lay with hands clasped over her throbbing heart, and relived every instant of the evening, thrilling to a happiness so intense that she felt as though she must die of it.
She was perfectly incapable just then of looking beyond the immediate present and the glorious certainty of seeing Leslie Morrison again in the morning.
Although Elsie had been attracted, in a sensual and superficial manner, by a number of men, she had never in her life loved before, and the passion for Morrison that had suddenly swept into her life held all the force of a long repressed element violently and unexpectedly liberated.
Body, soul and spirit, she was obsessed almost to madness by this young man, several years her junior, whom she had not known a month.
When Horace Williams came up to bed it was nearly midnight, and Elsie, her face half buried under the sheet, pretended to be asleep.
IV
The love-affair of Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison swept on its course, and in the early days of their madness neither of them paused for an instant to count its possible cost.