Her stillness and her shut eyes moved him to compunction. They appeased him with reminiscence, with suggestion of her smooth and innocent sleep.
He had been thinking of what she had done to him; of how she had lied to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out to him in her agony. The thought of Mary's turpitude had consoled him mysteriously. Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he was poisoned with it.
For the sting of it and the violence of his own resentment were more tolerable to Rowcliffe than the stale, dull realisation of the fact that Mary bored him. It had come to that. He had nothing to say to Mary now that he had married her. His romantic youth still moved uneasily within him; it found no peace in an armchair, facing Mary. He dreaded these evenings that he was compelled to spend with her. He dreaded her speech. He dreaded her silences ten times more. They no longer soothed him. They were pervading, menacing, significant.
He thought that Mary's turpitude accounted for and justified the exasperation of his nerves.
Now as he looked at her, lying back in the limp pose reminiscent of her sleep, he thought, "Poor thing. Poor Molly." He put down his book. He stood over her a moment, sighed a long sigh like a yawn, turned from her and went to bed.
Mary opened her eyes, sighed, stretched herself, put out the light, and followed him.
LII
Not long after that night it struck Mary that Steven was run down. He worked too hard. That was how she accounted to herself for his fits of exhaustion, of irritability and depression.
But secretly, for all her complacence, she had divined the cause.
She watched him now; she inquired into his goings out and comings in. Sometimes she knew that he had been to Garthdale, and, though he went there many more times than she knew, she had noticed that these moods of his followed invariably on his going. It was as if Gwenda left her mark on him. So much was certain, and by that certainty she went on to infer his going from his mood.