He remembers how Tita had once said to him that she never cared to kiss anyone except--Margaret.

Her hesitation returns to him now; was Margaret the name she would have said had not fear, mixed with prudence, prompted her words?
He remembers, too, that she had once refused to let _him_ kiss her lips--him, her husband! Why?
He trembles with rage as he asks himself this question.

Was it to keep them sacred for someone else--for that "old lover" of hers, for example?
Who had called him that?
Marian, was it not?
Old lover! He had laughed at the name then.

That child to have a lover! Why, he had believed she did not know the meaning of the word "love." What a baby she had always seemed to him--a careless, troublesome baby.

And now! Great heavens! Who is to be trusted?
Is anyone to be trusted?
He had put his faith in Tita; he had thought her wild, perhaps a little unmanageable, but--yes, he had thought her lovable; there had been moments when---- And now it had all come to this, that she had deceived him--is wilfully deceiving him.
He does not even in this, his angry hour, accuse her of more than a well-developed flirtation with her cousin; but that is the beginning of an end that he will put a stop to at once, and for ever.