when they arrived on Friday night and he could get him quietly alone. He
would tell him that the whole thing was a ghastly failure, but as he had
only himself to blame for entering into it he did not intend to reproach
any one. Only, he would frankly ask him to use his clever brain and
invent some plan that he and Zara could separate, without scandal, until
such time as he should grow indifferent, and so could come back and
casually live in the house with her. He was only a human man, he
admitted, and the present arrangement was impossible to bear. He was
past the anguish of the mockery of everything to-night--he was simply
numb. Then some waiting fiend made him think of Laura and her last
words. What if there were some truth in them after all? He had himself
seen the man twice, under the most suspicious circumstances. What if he
were her lover? How could Francis Markrute know of all her existence,
when he had said she had been an immaculate wife? And gradually, on top
of his other miseries, trifles light as air came and tortured him until
presently he had worked up a whole chain of evidence, proving the lover
theory to be correct!

Then he shook in his chair with rage, and muttered between his teeth:
"If I find this is true then I will kill him, and kill her, also!"

So near to savages are all human beings, when certain passions are
aroused. And neither bride nor bridegroom guessed that fate would soon
take things out of their hands and make their resolutions null and
void.



CHAPTER XXXVI