He jumped to his feet, throwing his cigar violently into the fire. For a minute or two he stood glaring at the embers. When he turned on her it was savagely.
"May I ask your motive in springing this on me, Marquise?"
"Mon Dieu, Col-on-el, I thought you'd like to know what a friend you have."
"Damn his friendship. That's not the reason. You've something up your sleeve."
She looked up at him innocently. "Have I? Then I must leave it to you to tell me what it is. But when you do," she added, smiling, "I hope you'll take another tone. In France men are gallant with women--"
"And in England women are straight with men. What they have to say they say. They don't lay snares, or lie in ambush."
She laughed. "Quant à cela, Col-on-el, il y en a pour tous les goûts, même en Angleterre."
He bowed stiffly, and went out into the hail. She continued to smoke daintily, pensively, while she listened to him noisily pulling on his overcoat and taking his stick from the stand. As he passed the library door he stopped on the threshold.
"By Gad, she's _mine_!" he said, fiercely.
She got up and went to him, taking him by the lapel of the coat. There was something like pity in her eyes as she said: "My poor fellow, nobody has raised that question. What's more, nobody _will_ raise it--unless you do yourself."
Ashley's craving was for space and air. He felt choked, strangled. There was a high wind blowing, carrying a sleety rain. It was a physical comfort to turn into the teeth of it.
He took a road straggling out of the town toward the remoter suburbs, and so into the country. He marched on, his eyes unseeing, his mouth set grimly--goaded by a kind of frenzy to run away from that which he knew he could not leave behind. It was like fleeing from something omnipresent. Though he should turn his back on it never so sternly and travel never so fast, it would be with him. It had already entered into his life as a constituent element; he could no more get rid of it than of his breath or his blood.
And yet the thing itself eluded him. In the very attempt to apprehend it by sight or name, he found it mysteriously beyond his grasp. It was like an enemy in the air, deadly but out of reach. It had struck him, though he could not as yet tell where. He could only stride onward through the wind and rain, as a man who has been shot can ride on till he falls.