Or was it for some demon of morality which, he knew, would have given him, later, no peace? Yet morality, as it subsequently seemed, was neither here nor there. No great store of spiritual energy had been liberated by his sacrifice; and his action, too high doubtless for any context which he could sustain for it, appeared to have had merely a destructive effect. He had passed years in a resentment against his wife which had gradually deadened his tenderness into pity and his pity into a dull resigned companionship. Their marriage had become a hollow frame. It was for that solid but echoing framework, its painted exterior so bravely held up to the world, that he had given up the peril of a great love.

Though Emma Sands had been Fanny's childhood friend, Hugh had seen little of her in the early years of his marriage. Emma had been away school-teaching, first Abroad, later in the north of England. Then she came to London; and Fanny, who always feared bluestockings, had treated her remarkable friend with a mixture of timidity and casualness: and Hugh had seen Emma as awfully nice, awfully clever, but awfully absurd. Then he looked again. From the moment when, in Emma's dark over-furnished flat at Notting Hill, he had with a burst of illumination which came quite suddenly, and with a deep prophetic groan, taken her into his Anns, until the moment when he had walked away down the long corridor in a coma of misery, had been a space of two years. It sometimes seemed to him that that time had been his only real life, and what began and ended it his only real actions.

Emma had never married; and Hugh had not met her since, though he had, at strangely regular intervals, seen her: distantly at a party, in the National Gallery, from a passing bus. He had occasion, of course, abundantly to know of her, since it was after their parting that she had begun to write the detective stories which had made her by now so famous. By this inconvenient fame, if by nothing else, her image had been kept vivid and even unnervingly up to date. Hugh was aware too, and this was more disturbing, that Randall, somewhere in the mysterious private maze of his London existence, had run across Emma. What his son and his former mistress made of each other he did not know. It was a subject from which he averted his mind.