He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was reading....
At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was a horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He had not known it would be like this....
He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
VII
A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”
The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told me you were out and I came upstairs.”
The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
“Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he obstructed her vision of the books.
“I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”