I want to be alone with my husband, and your husband wants to be alone with his wife: won't you oblige us and him--Hein ?" Sophie gave Ferrol a look which haunted him while he lived.

One idle afternoon he had sowed the seeds of a little storm in the heart of a woman, and a whirlwind was driving through her life to parch and make desolate the green fields of her youth and womanhood.

He had loitered and dallied without motive; but the idle and unmeaning sinner is the most dangerous to others and to himself, and he realised it at that moment, so far as it was in him to realise anything of the kind.
Sophie's figure as it left the room had that drooping, beaten look which only comes to the stricken and the incurably humiliated.
"What have you said to her ?" asked Christine of Ferrol, "what have you done to her ?" "I didn't do a thing, upon my soul.

I didn't say a thing.

She'd only just come in." "What did she say to you ?" "As near as I can remember, she said: 'You have been hurt, and I'm very sorry.