He stumbled against a chair and swore again savagely.

He was answered by a soft laugh, and then he saw Evelyn seated in the big arm-chair at one side of the fireplace.
"Did you hurt yourself, Marsh ?" she asked.
Langham growled an unintelligible reply and dropped heavily into a chair.

He brought with him the fumes of whisky and stale tobacco, and as these reached her across the intervening space Evelyn made a little grimace in the half light.
"I declare, Marsh, you are hardly fit to enter a respectable house!" she said.
In spite of his doubt of her, they were not on the worst of terms, there were still times when he resumed his old role of the lover, when he held her drifting fancy in something of the potent spell he had once been able to weave about her.

Whatever their life together, it was far from commonplace, with its poverty and extravagance, its quarrelings and its reconciliations, while back of it all, deep-rooted in the very dregs of existence, was his passionate love.

Even his brutal indifference was but one of the many phases of his love; it was a manifestation of his revolt against his sense of dependence, a dependence which made it possible for him to love where his faith was destroyed and his trust gone absolutely.
Evelyn was vaguely conscious of this and she was not sure but that she required just such a life as theirs had become, but that she would have been infinitely bored with a man far more worth while than Marshall Langham.