While sitting before the fire, gathering together these dark thoughts, I was in such fear that I was always conscious of my husband's movements in the adjoining room. At one moment there was the jingling of his glass against the decanter, at another moment the smell of his cigarette smoke. From time to time he came to the door and called to me in a sort of husky whisper, asking if I was in bed.
"Don't keep me long, little girl."
I shuddered but made no reply.
At last he knocked softly and said he was coming in. I was still crouching over the fire as he came up behind me.
"Not in bed yet?" he said. "Then I must put you to bed."
Before I could prevent him he had lifted me in his arms, dragged me on to his knee and was pulling down my hair, laughing as he did so, calling me by coarse endearing names and telling me not to fight and struggle.
But the next thing I knew I was back in the sitting-room, where I had switched up the lights, and my husband, whose face was distorted by passion, was blazing out at me.
"What do you mean?" he said. "I'm your husband, am I not? You are my wife, aren't you? What did you marry for? Good heavens, can it be possible that you don't know what the conditions of matrimony are? Is that what comes of being brought up in a convent? But has your father allowed you to marry without. . . . And your Aunt—what in God's name has the woman been doing?"
I crossed towards the smaller bedroom intending to enter it, but my husband intercepted me.
"Don't be a fool," he said, catching at my wrist. "Think of the servants. Think what they'd say. Think what the whole island would say. Do you want to make a laughing stock of both of us?"