Between seven and eight o'clock on Tuesday evening, Tanqueray, in an execrable temper, returned to his home.
The little house had an air of bright expectancy, not to say of festival; it was so intensely, so unusually illuminated. Each window, with its drawn blind, was a golden square in the ivy-darkened wall.
Tanqueray let himself in noiselessly with his latchkey. He took up the pile of letters that waited for him on the hat-stand in the hall, and turned into the dining-room.
It smiled at him brilliantly with all its lights. So did the table, laid for dinner; the very forks and spoons smiled, twinkling and limping in irrepressible welcome. A fire burned ostentatiously in the hearth-place. It sent out at him eager, loquacious tongues of flame, to draw him to the insufferable endearments of the hearth.
He was aware now that what he was most afraid of in this horrible coming back was his wife's insupportable affection.
He turned the lights down a little lower. All his movements were noiseless. He was afraid that Rose would hear him and would come running down.
He went up-stairs, treading quietly. He meant to take his letters to his study and read them there. He might even answer some of them. Anything to stave off the moment when he must meet Rose.
The door of her bedroom was wide open. The light flared so high that he judged that Rose was in there and about to appear. He swung himself swiftly and dexterously round the angle of the stair-rail, and so reached his own door.
She must have heard him go in, but there was no answering movement from her room.
With a closed door behind him he sat down and looked over his letters. Bills, proofs from the "Monthly Review," a letter from Laura that saddened him (he had not realized that Prothero was so ill). Last of all, at the bottom of the pile, a little note from Rose.