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238 fork. After some moments she looked at him. She saw that his face was haggard, and pale under its brown tone. She recognised in its drawn look of nervous fatigue the accentuation of a change that had been coming about for some time, that she had noticed at intervals during the winter. At last he glanced up, and his eyes, that had always seemed to her so strangely young, now in their passionate misery sent a pang to her heart.

"Perhaps it is best for you," he said with some difficulty, looking down again. "Perhaps you will be better off, away from me. But it isn't best for me."

"For both of us, I think," she said gently.

"Not for me! I want you, I need you, and now more than ever. You could be a thousand times more to me now even than you have been. For this last year you've hardly been mine at all—you've been away in spirit—you haven't been conscious of me much of the time"

"And, therefore, you took a mistress."

His fork dropped with a clatter on his plate. "I did no such thing! But if I had tried to have—not a mistress, I couldn't—but some sort of active interest in my life, most people wouldn't blame me"

"It was because I was so unhappy," Teresa said in her far-away voice. "Life seemed to have been taken out of me for the time. I could