She felt a rush of tears: no, there were times when fate was too cruel, the future too horrible to contemplate, and the past—the past, oh, how much worse! And there he sat, coughing, coughing—and thinking God knows what, behind those quiet half-closed lids. At such times he grew so mysteriously remote that she felt lonelier than when he was not in the room.
He roused himself. “Yes?”
“Here’s your tea.”
He took it from her in silence, and she began, nervously, to wonder why he was not talking. Was it because he was afraid it might make him cough again, afraid she would be worried, and scold him? Or was it because he was thinking—thinking of things he had heard at old Mrs. Parrett’s, or on the drive home with Sillerton Jackson ... hints they might have dropped ... insinuations ... she didn’t know what ... or of something he had seen, perhaps, from old Mrs. Parrett’s window? She looked across at his white forehead, so smooth and impenetrable in the lamplight, and thought: “Oh, God, it’s like a locked door. I shall dash my brains out against it some day!”
For, after all, it was not impossible that he had actually seen her, seen her from Mrs. Parrett’s window, or even from the crowd around the door of the hotel. For all she knew, he might have been near enough, in that crowd, to put out his hand and touch her. And he might have held back, benumbed, aghast, not believing his own eyes.... She couldn’t tell. She had never yet made up her mind how he would look, how he would behave, what he would say, if ever he did see or hear anything....
No! That was the worst of it. They had lived together for nearly nine years—and how closely!—and nothing that she knew of him, or had observed in him, enabled her to forecast exactly what, in that particular case, his state of mind and his attitude would be. In his profession, she knew, he was celebrated for his shrewdness and insight; in personal matters he often seemed, to her alert mind, oddly absent-minded and indifferent. Yet that might be merely his instinctive way of saving his strength for things he considered more important. There were times when she was sure he was quite deliberate and self-controlled enough to feel in one way and behave in another: perhaps even to have thought out a course in advance—just as, at the first bad symptoms of illness, he had calmly made his will, and planned everything about her future, the house and the servants.... No, she couldn’t tell; there always hung over her the thin glittering menace of a danger she could neither define nor localize—like that avenging lightning which groped for the lovers in the horrible poem he had once read aloud to her (what a choice!) on a lazy afternoon of their wedding journey, as they lay stretched under Italian stone-pines.
The maid came in to draw the curtains and light the lamps. The fire glowed, the scent of the roses drifted on the warm air, and the clock ticked out the minutes, and softly struck a half hour, while Mrs. Hazeldean continued to ask herself, as she so often had before: “Now, what would be the natural thing for me to say?”
And suddenly the words escaped from her, she didn’t know how: “I wonder you didn’t see me coming out of the hotel—for I actually squeezed my way in.”
Her husband made no answer. Her heart jumped convulsively; then she lifted her eyes and saw that he was asleep. How placid his face looked—years younger than when he was awake! The immensity of her relief rushed over her in a warm glow, the counterpart of the icy sweat which had sent her chattering homeward from the fire. After all, if he could fall asleep, fall into such a peaceful sleep as that—tired, no doubt, by his imprudent walk, and the exposure to the cold—it meant, beyond all doubt, beyond all conceivable dread, that he knew nothing, had seen nothing, suspected nothing: that she was safe, safe, safe!