No dream of suspicions on his part had come to her, but it was enough that something had happened to intensify his dislike of Hubert.

Of her many fears, here was one which couched dark and shapeless in the background.
A feeble woman would have chosen anyone--her mother, her brother--rather than Mutimer himself for the first participant in such a discovery.
Adela was not feeble, and the very danger, though it might chill her senses, nerved her soul.

Was she not making him too ignoble?
Was she not herself responsible for much of the strangeness in his behaviour of late?
The question she had once asked herself, whether he loved her, she could not answer doubtfully; was it not his love that had set her icily against him?
If she could not render him love in return, that was the wrong she did him, the sin she had committed in becoming his wife.

Adela by this time knew too well that, in her threefold vows, love had of right the foremost place; honour and obedience could not exist without love.

Her wrong was involuntary, none the less she owed him such reparation as was possible; she must keep her mind open to his better qualities.