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Rh a deeper instinct cried out, 'Away with it!' He forced his mind back to her story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible conviction. It was all very fine; but it would not do.

'I feel as if I had led you into saying more than you meant to say, or than I wanted to learn,' he said slowly. 'But there is one brutal question which is the whole point of my enquiry.' He braced his frame like one preparing for a plunge into cold waters. 'Mrs. Manderson, will you assure me that your husband's change towards you had nothing to do with John Marlowe?'

And what he had dreaded came. 'Oh!' she cried with a sound of anguish, her face thrown up and open hands stretched out as if for pity; and then the hands covered the burning face, and she flung herself aside among the cushions at her elbow, so that he saw nothing but her heavy crown of black hair, and her body moving with sobs that stabbed his heart, and a foot turned inward gracelessly in an abandonment of misery. Like a tall tower suddenly breaking apart she had fallen in ruins, helplessly weeping.