“Shall I wait outside?”
“No, Pip. Go home. Yes,—there are some things you must leave to me.”
She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the younger man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be at any cost splendid. He felt—and it was a most unexpected and disconcerting feeling—that he was no longer confederated with Amanda; that prior, more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his little new grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife aghast in this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his help. “I would trust you—” he began. “If you tell me to go—”
Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
She laid her hand upon his arm. “Go, my dear Pip,” she said. “Go.”
He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen, somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.
Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
“WELL?” said Benham.
She held out her arms to him.
“Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you leave me?”