Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/345

Rh he would not come back. And it ﬂashed across him that this solution might have been foreseen by his wife,—might even have been deliberately planned and led up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him—the disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface of Mr. Langhope’s existence. He must have been horribly in their way! Well—it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy’s circle the severing of such ties was regarded as an expensive but unhazardous piece of surgery—nobody bled to death of the wound.… The footman came back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and Amherst rose to his feet.

“Send him back to the stable,” he said with a glance at his watch, “and order a trap to take me to the next train.”

XXII

HEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the ﬁrst necessity of being, became a weak procrastinator when [ 329 ]