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CHAPTER XV.

CONFLAGRATION.

To see his wife casually in a crowd, and to fall desperately in love with her for the second time, was a unique experience even in Tyson's life. But it had its danger. He had never been jealous before; now a feeling very like jealousy had been roused by seeing her with Stanistreet. He had followed her to the "Criterion"; he had hurried out before the end of the piece, and hung about Ridgmount Gardens till he had seen her homecoming. Stanistreet's immediate departure was a relief to a certain anxiety that he was base enough to feel. And still there remained a vague suspicion and discomfort. He had to begin all over again with her. In

their first courtship she was a child; in their second she was a woman. Hitherto, the creature of a day, she had seemed to spring into life afresh every morning, without a memory of yesterday or a thought of tomorrow; she had had no past, not even an innocent one. And now he had no notion what experiences she might not have accumulated during this year in which he had left her. That was her past; and they had the future before them.

They had been alone together for three days, three days and three nights of happiness; and on the evening of the fourth day Tyson had found her reading—yes, actually reading!

He sat down opposite her to watch the curious sight.

Perhaps she had said to herself: "Some day I shall be old, and very likely I shall be ugly. If I am stupid too, he will be bored, and perhaps he will leave me. So now-I am going to be his intellectual companion."

He was amused, just as Stanistreet had

been. "I say, I can't have that, you know. What have you got there?"

She held up her book without speaking. "Othello," of all things in the world!

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Shakespeare? I thought so. When a woman's in a damned bad temper she always reads Shakespeare, or Locke on the Human Understanding. Come out of that."

Though Mrs Nevill Tyson set her little teeth very hard, the corners of her mouth and eyes curled with mischief. It was delicious to feel that she could torment Nevill, to know that she had so much power. And while she pretended to read she played with the pearl necklace she wore.

It was

one shade with the white of her beautiful throat.

"Who gave you those pearls?"

She made no answer, but her hand dropped a little consciously. He had given them to her that afternoon, remarking, with rather questionable taste, that they were "a wedding - present for the second Mrs Nevill Tyson."

He leant over her chair and assailed her with questions to which no answer came, to which no answer was possible, punctuating his periods with kisses. "Are you a conundrum? Or a metaphysical system? do you wear a pink frock? woman who prefers a dead poet to a living husband? Are you a young woman at all? Or only a dear little, sweet little, pink little strawberry iceberg?'

Or a fiend? And if so, why Are you a young

He lay down on the sofa as if overcome by

unutterable fatigue.

murmured faintly.

"Just as you like,” he "You'll be sorry for

this some day. Shakespeare is immortal. I, most unfortunately, am not."

He got up and threw the window open. He ramped about the room, soliloquising as he went. Never, even in the last days of their engagement, had she seen him so restless. (But she was not going to speak yet; not she!) He stopped before the chimney - piece; it was covered with ridiculous objects, the things that please a child: there were Swiss cow-bells and stags carved in

wood, Chinese idols that wagged their heads, little images of performing cats, teacups, a whole shelf full of toys. Not one of them but had some minute fragment of his wife's personality adhering to it. He remembered the insane impulse that came upon him last year to smash them, sweep the lot of them on to the floor. To-night he could have kissed them, cried over them. "T-t-t-tt! What affecting absurdity!" That was the way he went on. And now he had sat down by her writing-table, and was taking things up and examining them while he talked. He never, never forgot the expression of a certain brass porcupine that was somehow a penwiper; it seemed to belong to a world gone mad, where everything was something else, where porcupines were penwipers, and his wife

For suddenly his tongue had stopped. He had caught sight of an enormous bunch of hothouse flowers in a vase on the floor by the writing-table. Stanistreet's card was in the midst of the bunch, and a note from Stanistreet lay open on the writing-table.