She would like to see her children, she said, before she left, but she supposed he would have to settle that.

How had she got his address?
From his place of business probably, in some roundabout way.
Then what had happened?
Had she been seized with a sudden persuasion that he would not answer, that it was all useless trouble; and in one of those accesses of blind rage by which her clear, sharp brain-life was at all times apt to be disturbed, had she rushed out to end it all at once and for ever?
It made him forgive her that she _could_ have destroyed herself--could have faced that awful plunge--that icy water--that death-struggle for breath.

He gauged the misery she must have gone through by what he knew of her sensuous love for comfort, for _bien-etre_.

He saw her again as she had been that night at the theatre when they first met,--the little crisp black curls on the temples, the dazzling eyes, the artificial pearls round the neck, the slight traces of powder and rouge on brow and cheek, which made her all the more attractive and tempting to his man's eye--the pretty foot, which he first noticed as she stepped from the threshold of the theatre into the street.

Nature had made all that, to bring her work to this grim bed at last! He himself died eighteen months afterwards.