Connie had gone an hour before--he was too late to have detained her upon a pretext--and while sitting speechless before the dinner he could not eat--his heated imagination wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a spider's web.

What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally?
What if he missed her at the entrance to the opera?
Or what if--most desperate supposition--she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home?
She was capable, he knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her as walking open eyed into dishonour, and he felt again the awful, if partly comforting conviction that she was not herself--that an infernal drug was working in her and bending her to some particular uses of the devil.

Why had she wasted her beauty and even her life?
he wondered bitterly--and did the moment's mad exhilaration compensate for the slow deliberate eating away of her moral consciousness?
He recalled again the violent flutter of her manner, the excitement as of intoxication in her voice, the yellow tinge which had crept gradually over the ivory of her skin; her spasmodic movements and the ineffectual lies which deluded neither of them for an instant.

The tragedy of life rose before him as vividly as the humour of it had done an hour ago--a tragedy which was hideous because it was ignoble, in which there was neither the beauty of resignation nor the sublimity of defiance.

Had there been the least--even the smallest redeeming honesty in the situation he felt that he might have faced it, if not with positive sympathy yet with a tolerant, a merciful comprehension.