“I will have everything that belongs to you despatched wherever you think fit,” he continued, unheeding.
“And then?”
He shrugged his shoulders, looked at her askance for a second.
“Then I get my divorce.”
Her mind, dazed by exhaustion and the pain and the successive cataclysms of this disastrous interview, had not travelled a second beyond the lurid present. The bald word was a new shock, the final sledgehammer blow that sent love reeling. She grew very white.
“You intend to—divorce—me?” she said, slowly.
“That is my intention,” he replied, somewhat abashed before her staring eyes.
Irene shrank away from the door, and turned gropingly towards a couch against the wall. Gerard lingered for a moment on the threshold. Then he left her. She sank upon the couch shuddering and faint, looking helplessly at the upset flowers and the soaking pool of water upon the table-cover.