She was deliberately--he could not doubt it--extending the distance between them, annulling bygone intimacy, shifting into ineffective remoteness all manner of common associations.

Things she would formerly have understood at a half-word she now affected to need to have explained to her.

He was 'Mr.Athel' to an extent he had never been before; and even of his relatives she spoke with a diminished familiarity.

She emphasised at every moment the characteristics which were alien to his sympathies, talked of the 'revival' _ad nauseam_, or changed with alarming suddenness from that to topics of excessive frivolousness.

Wilfrid little by little ceased to converse with her, in the real sense of the word; he even felt uncomfortable in her presence.