"Not until I know myself," he said. "But there is one thing … I think it would be better all round if you saw less of each other until something is decided. I realize that Jock and Hurry and I are very much in the way. Jock and Hurry naturally don't care how much you two are together. But I do. It isn't that I don't trust you out of my sight. You know that. But the mind of a jealous man is a gallery hung with intolerable pictures. Merely to think of Lucy, Archie, giving you the same look that she used to have for me is to burn in hell-fire."
He turned on his heel, and left us abruptly. We could hear him calling to the nurse to ask how Hurry was feeling, and we could hear his steps going up the stair to the nursery.
"He's going to do the right thing, Lucy," I said.
"I wish he wouldn't talk and talk. The milk's spilled. I suppose we've got to keep more or less apart."
"Yes, Lucy."
I held out my arms, and for a moment we made, I suppose, one of those intolerable pictures that hung in Fulton's mental gallery. And then I went away.
It was good to have told. I was very deeply in love; I thought that Lucy's and my future could soon be smoothed into shape, but I did not feel happy. I felt as if I had been through a great ordeal of some sort, and had come off second best. It seemed to me that I ought to have stood up more loudly for my love, for its intensity and power to endure.
In addition there had been about John Fulton an ominous quiet. I could better have endured a violent outbreak. For there is no action without its reaction. After a storm there is calm. But Fulton's calm was more like that which precedes a storm.
His breakdown came after I had left. Lucy told me about it. He had come back to her in the living-room, and said things about me that she would never never forgive.
"I don't care what he says about me," she cried, "but if he talks to me against you, I won't stand it."