Page:Restless Earth.djvu/36

The note had broken him utterly. Worn out with two sleepless nights, a conscience that raked him with barbs, and a sense of abject shame that he had allowed the faithful wife and lover of years to go out of his life without a word of farewell, he had sprawled upon the table and wept.

Had there been a revolver ready to his hand he would have shot himself; but he had not then, or later, reached to such a depth that any less sudden method of self-destruction appealed to him.

When the noon whistles had sounded in the town he had roused himself sufficiently to offer a fervent prayer to his nebulous God for the happiness of Grace and Joan, and to stoop to stroke Ginger who rubbed against his leg and miaowed for food.

The blue cod had been quite cold when he had taken it from the oven.

****

And this was the end of it.

After weeks of loneliness, weeks of mental torture, weeks spent in weighing Grace’s wifely virtues against the primordial attraction of Patricia Weybourn—an operation in which it shamed him to realise that little Joan added not a pennyweight to disturb the scales in favour of his remembrance of his nuptial promises—weeks in which literary labour and sleep had alike been almost impossible, he had made his decision.

He had chosen ‘the other woman,’ and the knowledge increased his wretchedness.

What had happened to his old love for Joan during this emotional upheaval? According to the rules governing these affairs, rules to which he had slavishly subsecribed in his stories, the parents’ mutual love of their children was a dispensation of Heaven to seal the bonds forged at the altar. What had happened?

He was actually relieved to be rid of the child. Could it be that, after all, men were but mating animals, and, like the animals, easily forgetful of their