I want to be alone for a bit." He went away, sulkily acquiescent.

There was a room always kept ready for him on the same floor, at the further end of a short thickly carpeted passage.
How she passed the night, this woman with no illusions to help her through the hours which must have been sleepless I shouldn't like to say.
It ended at last; and this strange victim of the de Barral failure, whose name would never be known to the Official Receiver, came down to breakfast, impenetrable in her everyday perfection.

From the very first, somehow, she had accepted the fatal news for true.

All her life she had never believed in her luck, with that pessimism of the passionate who at bottom feel themselves to be the outcasts of a morally restrained universe.

But this did not make it any easier, on opening the morning paper feverishly, to see the thing confirmed.