He bent towards her, with cheeks flaming. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he said, and for a moment could not go on. To Sheila life was become exquisitely unreal, a work of art. ‘You must know,’ he said brokenly, ‘that I adore you.’
Compassionately she laid her cool hand on his.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a low tone tenderly soothing.
‘Ah!’ His breath fluttered. She gave him her trembling lips.
They kissed, first, like boy and girl, timidly; then like comrades united after a long parting; again, and a red splendour flamed through the throbbing world. He lifted her into his arms, and divine madness seized her. He carried her with strong unfaltering stride into the house.
And this day, which they had called the end, was really the beginning. She returned on the morrow to Edward’s house and confided to her husband that she wished him to divorce her. Edward listened patiently, like the disinterested friend he was; but his disinterestedness made her pride wince, and the old hated surroundings were bleak about her. Yet on that night of her return, in the sanctuary of her bedroom, she undressed with a new joy. She stood nude before the wardrobe mirror and gazed with awe upon the pure rounded loveliness of her own form. She stroked gently her white velvet skin. Her body, so long disdained, had become sacred to her again. As she laid her head, that kingdom of heaven, upon her pillow, and murmured Stephen’s name, Stephen himself, in a suburb fourteen miles away, posted his weekly letter to the girl—no adventuress, she—who was to become his wife and the mother of his only son. For Stephen, too, was back in the old routine, enfolded and pressed close to the bosom of his family, conscious of his mother’s eyes watching him with an angry solicitude. Not without a struggle did he succumb. To Grace, whose pretty simplicity no longer held him, he hinted dire things; but at the first gesture of suffering from her he winced, and surrendered. And he wrote to Sheila in his best literary style. She carried the letter, as she had carried its predecessors, into the summer-house, that she might commune with her lover undisturbed.
‘Darling,’ she read, ‘the thought of how I must hurt you is hell to me.’
She caught her breath, looked once upon the sky, and then bent her eyes again to receive the blow....
With mind benumbed she looked up from the fastidious caligraphy to find Stephen himself standing, like a whipped dog, before her. For a moment they strangely stared.
‘Why have you come?’