IV
A GREVIOUS WOUND
After that moment of madness by the wishing-gate Nina's wanton desire to provoke to wrath the monster to whom she was chained died a sudden and unnatural death. She was scrupulously careful of his feelings from that day forward, and he treated her with a freezing courtesy, a cynical consideration, that seemed to form a barrier behind which the actual man concealed himself and watched.
That he did watch her was a fact of which she was miserably conscious. She knew with the certain knowledge of intuition that he studied her continually. She was perpetually under the microscope of his criticism, and there were times when she told herself she could not bear it. He was too much for her; too pitiless a tyrant, too stern a master. Her life was becoming insupportable.
A fortnight of their honeymoon had passed away, when one morning Wingarde looked up with a frown from a letter.
"I have had a summons to town," he said abruptly.
Nina's heart leapt at the words, and her relief showed itself for one unmanageable second in her face.
He saw it, and she knew he saw it.