only available friend we have close enough to ask at once. And
things of this kind are, I suppose, if anybody's concern, his.
It's certain to leak out. Everybody will hear of it. Don't
flatter yourself you are going to hush up a thing like this for
long. You can't keep living skeletons in a cupboard. You think
only of yourself, only of your own misfortune. But who's to know,
pray, that you really are my husband--if you are? The sooner I
get the vicar on my side the better for us both. Who in the whole
of the parish--I ask you--and you must have the sense left to see
that--who will believe that a respectable man, a gentleman, a
Churchman, would deliberately go out to seek an afternoon's
amusement in a poky little country churchyard? Why, apart from
everything else, THAT was absolutely mad to start with. Can you
really wonder at the result?'

Probably because she still steadfastly refused to look at him,
her memory kept losing its hold on the appalling fact facing
them. She realised fully only that she was in a great,
unwarrantable, and insurmountable difficulty, but until she
actually lifted her eyes for a moment she had not fully realised
what that difficulty was. She got up with a sudden and horrible
nausea. 'One moment,' she said, 'I will see if the servants have
gone to bed.'

That long saturnine face, behind which Lawford lay in a dull and
desperate ambush, smiled. Something partaking of its clay, some
reflex ghost of its rather remarkable features, was even a little
amused at Sheila.

She returned in a moment, and stood in profile in the doorway.