He held her, looking into her eyes, Slowly she sank away from him; she
would have fallen, but for a chair that stood beside her.

'Oh, yer brute!' she said, turning her head to Saunders an instant, and
speaking under her breath, with a kind of sob. 'Yer _brute_!'

Isaac walked to the door, and threw it open.

'Per'aps yer'll go,' he said, grimly.
And the three went, without a word.




SCENE V

So the husband and wife were left together in the cottage room. The door
had no sooner closed on Saunders and his companions than Isaac was
seized with that strange sense of walking amid things unreal upon a
wavering earth which is apt to beset the man who has any portion of the
dreamer's temperament, under any sudden rush of circumstance. He drew
his hand across his brow, bewildered. The fire leapt and chattered in
the grate; the newly-washed tea-things on the table shone under the
lamp; the cat lay curled, as usual, on the chair where he sat after
supper to read his _Christian World_; yet all things were not the same.
What had changed?

Then across poor John's rifled box he saw his wife sitting rigid on the
chair where he had left her.