theatre.

Well, he would see them both on the morrow and make his peace, and
then--he dropped his head on his hands and fairly groaned. It was
useless to argue with himself, to bring commonsense to bear upon the
point, to count up the advantages to be derived from this union with
Lady Ethel; look at it which way he would, the fact remained the
same, that he had no longer the remotest desire to marry again.

The knowledge had certainly come tardily, but not the less surely.

He did not, he told himself, love Lady Ethel as a man should love the
wife of his bosom. Middle-aged, worn, and unemotional though he might
be, he knew that he was yet capable of a much deeper feeling than she
had evoked and he had wakened to a realisation of this since he had
again seen Bella.

He was no fool; he was, on the contrary, a shrewd, clever,
quick-witted man of the world and it was impossible to shut his eyes
to the trouble. He thought of Bella as she was when he had first
married her; he recalled their courtship, her pretty half shy, half
tender ways--the girlish prettiness which time had turned into shame.

She had left a scrap of lace on his table for her throat or her
veil--Heaven knew what--and his eyes grew blurred and dim as he gazed
at it. He repeated mentally phrases which had fallen from her,
piecing them together and trying to weave the pattern of her life out
of the fragments.

She had changed pathetically. She had acquired the manner that her