“My experience has not been one to promote blind confidence in her word. We shall see.”

Jolyon got up.

“Goodbye,” he said curtly.

“Goodbye,” returned Soames; and Jolyon went out trying to understand the look, half-startled, half-menacing, on his cousin’s face. He sought Waterloo Station in a disturbed frame of mind, as though the skin of his moral being had been scraped; and all the way down in the train he thought of Irene in her lonely flat, and of Soames in his lonely office, and of the strange paralysis of life that lay on them both. “In chancery!” he thought. “Both their necks in chancery⁠—and hers so pretty!”

Val Hears the News