It was not that he had feared open and immediate treachery.

If a rage had burned through him, at the sudden and startling sight of his own wife thus secretly masquerading in an unknown role, it was far from being a rage or mere jealousy and distrust.
They had, in other days, each passed through questionable and perilous experiences.

Both together and alone they had adventured unwillingly along many of the more dubious channels of life.

They had surrendered to temptation; they had sown and reaped and suffered, and become weary of it.

They had struggled slowly yet stoically up towards respectability; they had fought for fair-dealing; they had entered a compact to stand by each other through that long and bitter effort to be tardily honest and autumnally aboveboard.
What now so disturbed and disheartened him was the sudden sense of something impending, the vague apprehension of some momentous and far-reaching intrigue which he could not even foreshadow.