Chapter 29 - Page 2

understand."

"I'm beginning to."

He sat in silence gathering force. "In one year," he said, "all my
hopes, all my ambitions have gone. I know I have been cross and
irritable--I know that. I've been pulled two ways. But ... I bought
you these roses."

She looked at the roses, and then at his white face, made an
imperceptible movement towards him, and became impassive again.

"I do think one thing. I have found out you are shallow, you don't
think, you can't feel things that I think and feel. I have been
getting over that. But I did think you were loyal--"

"I _am_ loyal," she cried.

"And you think--Bah!--you poke my roses under the table!"

Another portentous silence. Ethel stirred and he turned his eyes to
watch what she was about to do. She produced her handkerchief and
began to wipe her dry eyes rapidly, first one and then the other. Then
she began sobbing. "I'm ... as loyal as you ... anyhow," she said.

For a moment Lewisham was aghast. Then he perceived he must ignore
that argument.

"I would have stood it--I would have stood anything if you had been
loyal--if I could have been sure of you. I am a fool, I know, but I
would have stood the interruption of my work, the loss of any hope of
a Career, if I had been sure you were loyal. I ... I cared for you a
great deal."

He stopped. He had suddenly perceived the pathetic. He took refuge in
anger.

"And you have deceived me! How long, how much, I don't care. You have
deceived me. And I tell you"--he began to gesticulate--"I'm not so
much your slave and fool as to stand that! No woman shall make me
_that_ sort of fool, whatever else--So far as I am concerned, this
ends things. This ends things. We are married--but I don't care if we
were married five hundred times. I won't stop with a woman who takes
flowers from another man--"

"I _didn't_," said Ethel.

Lewisham gave way to a transport of anger. He caught up a handful of
roses and extended them, trembling. "What's _this_?" he asked. His
finger bled from a thorn, as once it had bled from a blackthorn spray.

"I _didn't_ take them," said Ethel. "I couldn't help it if they were
sent."

"Ugh!" said Lewisham. "But what is the good of argument and denial?
You took them in, you had them. You may have been cunning, but you
have given yourself away. And our life and all this"--he waved an
inclusive hand at Madam Gadow's furniture--"is at an end."

He looked at her and repeated with bitter satisfaction, "At an end."

She glanced at his face, and his