"Indeed! How do you know?"
"Well!—I don't know; I think."
"And when you had put Miss Arkroyd out, what happened?"
"How do you mean 'what happened'?"
"Oh, don't tell me if you don't like! I am out of it!"
Now, Challis would have liked to be able to say, "It is by your own choice that you are out of it; and the whole of this misunderstanding has grown, through a good intention of this lady you hate, to bring you into it." But he had tied his own tongue. "It"—whatever it was—had ceased to exist for him now at Royd. And probably his future intercourse with Grosvenor Square would be limited to just such an allowance of formal calls as would draw a veil over strained relations, and silence suggestion of ostracism. His behaviour of the previous evening had created a no-thoroughfare; but the conversation had hardly arrived at the notice-board.
"Nothing happened; the burns were not bad." His words were almost true—the prevarication, in this form, of the slightest, but the notice-board was clearly legible by now. "We left the garden, and no more was said about the letter, because some men from the house joined us, talking politics."
But Marianne has gone stony. Her manner rejects the men from the house, who talked politics. "I s-see," she says, fully expressing the closure of her mind against all extenuations, palliations, evasions, or excuses. "The letter was burned, and there was an end of it."
"Exactly! An end of it!" He extended the phrase in his mind to his relations with Royd, and all belonging to them.
Marianne waited so incisively for anything further to be said by her husband, and he felt so certain that if the no-thoroughfare notice were disregarded, the trespassers would suffer penalties—his own being enforced disclosure of what would be injurious to both, and quite useless—that he was almost glad when his wife said stonily: "Your whisky is getting cold. Perhaps you had better take it." He answered drearily, "Perhaps I had," and went away, but not to the dining-room. He went to his own study, and sat there aimlessly, thinking, in the half-dark. Presently, making as little noise as possible, he went downstairs, put out the lights that had been left burning, and, going stealthily out at the front-door, went for a walk in the moonlight.