He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face, from before which, to soothe her, he had tried to pull her hands⁠—of her terrible smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still seemed to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling of remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the flame of the single candle, before silently slinking away.

And somehow, now that he had acted like this, he was surprised at himself.

Two nights before, at Winifred Dartie’s, he had taken Mrs. MacAnder into dinner. She had said to him, looking in his face with her sharp, greenish eyes: “And so your wife is a great friend of that Mr. Bosinney’s?”

Not deigning to ask what she meant, he had brooded over her words.

They had roused in him a fierce jealousy, which, with the peculiar perversion of this instinct, had turned to fiercer desire.

Without the incentive of Mrs. MacAnder’s words he might never have done what he had done. Without their incentive and the accident of finding his wife’s door for once unlocked, which had enabled him to steal upon her asleep.

Slumber had removed his doubts, but the morning brought them again. One thought comforted him: No one would know⁠—it was not the sort of thing that she would speak about.