Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Bella was standing before the Sheraton bureau which had been the gift of Peter Joliffe. She had apparently been putting something away; Germaine heard the click of the lock. She turned round quickly, and her husband thought there was a look of constraint on her face.

"Why, Oliver," she said, "I thought you were going out with Fanny this afternoon!"

"With Fanny?" he stammered, "I never thought of doing such a thing."

"But you're not going to stay in, are you?"

He looked at her attentively, and again there surged up in his heart wild jealousy and suspicion. Why did she ask whether he was going to stay in? Which of the two men who had just left the house was she expecting to come back as soon as he, poor deluded fool, was safely out of the way?

But Bella went on speaking rather quickly: "I shan't go out. I'm tired. Besides, I'm expecting some people to tea. So perhaps I'd better go and take my hat off. I shall only be a few minutes; do wait till I come back." Bella spoke rather breathlessly, moving across the room towards the door.

Then she didn't want him to go out? He had wronged her in this, at any rate. Germaine stared at the door through which his wife had just gone with a feeling of miserable uncertainty.

Then his eye travelled round to the place where she had been standing just now, in front of Joliffe's bureau. A glance at Bella's bank-book would set his mind at rest one way or the other. It would go far to prove or disprove the story Mrs. Bliss had told, for it would show if Bella were indeed in the habit of drawing considerable cheques to "self." Why hadn't he thought of this simple test before,—before shaming himself and shaming his wife by base suspicions?

And yet Oliver, for some few moments, stood in the middle of the room irresolute. Yesterday it would never have occurred to him that Bella would mind his looking at her bank-book, although, as a matter of fact he never had looked at it. She was a tidy little woman; he knew that everything under the flap which he had seen her close down so quickly just now would be exquisitely neat; he knew the exact spot where her bank-book was to be found.

With a curious feeling that he was doing something dishonourable,—and it was a feeling which sat very uneasily on Oliver Germaine,—he took hold of the little brass knob and slid up the flap of the sloping desk.