Having cleared away, he sat down.

`Did you love your wife?' she asked him.

`Love?' he said. `Did you love Sir Clifford?'

But she was not going to be put off.

`But you cared for her?' she insisted.

`Cared?' He grinned.

`Perhaps you care for her now,' she said.

`Me!' His eyes widened. `Ah no, I can't think of her,' he said quietly.

`Why?'

But he shook his head.

`Then why don't you get a divorce? She'll come back to you one day,' said Connie.

He looked up at her sharply.

`She wouldn't come within a mile of me. She hates me a lot worse than I hate her.'

`You'll see she'll come back to you.'

`That she never will. That's done! It would make me sick to see her.'

`You will see her. And you're not even legally separated, are you?'

`No.'

`Ah well, then she'll come back, and you'll have to take her in.'

He gazed at Connie fixedly. Then he gave the queer toss of his head.

`You might be right. I was a fool ever to come back here. But I felt stranded and had to go somewhere. A man's a poor bit of a wastrel blown about. But you're right. I'll get a divorce and get clear. I hate those things like death, officials and courts and judges. But I've got to get through with it. I'll get a divorce.'

And she saw his jaw set. Inwardly she exulted. `I think I will have a cup of tea now,' she said. He rose to make it. But his face was set. As they sat at table she asked him:

`Why did you marry her? She was commoner than yourself. Mrs Bolton told me about her. She could never understand why you married her.'

He looked at her fixedly.

`I'll tell you,' he said. `The first girl I had, I began with when I was sixteen. She was a school-master's daughter over at Ollerton, pretty, beautiful really. I was supposed to be a clever sort of young fellow from Sheffield Grammar School, with a bit of French and German, very much up aloft. She was the romantic sort that hated commonness. She egged me on to poetry and reading: in a way, she made a man of me. I read and I thought like a house on fire, for her. And I was a clerk in Butterley offices, thin, white-faced fellow fuming with all the things I read. And about everything I talked to her: but everything. We talked ourselves into Persepolis and Timbuctoo. We were the most literary-cultured couple in ten