She wasn't easy to live with, and she had been often, before now, ridiculously jealous; but you could not, apparently, live with a woman without getting very fond of her--he couldn't--especially if she had given you a child; and if Daphne had turned against him now, for a bit--well, he could not swear to himself that he had been free from blame; and it perhaps served him right for having gone out deliberately to the States to marry money--with a wife thrown in--in that shabby sort of way.
But, now, to straighten out this coil; to shake himself finally free of Chloe, and make Daphne happy again! He vowed to himself that he could and would make her happy--just as she had been in their early days together.

The memory of her lying white and exhausted after child-birth, with the little dark head beside her, came across him, and melted him; he thought of her with longing and tenderness.
With a deep breath he raised himself on his seat; in the old Greek phrase, "the gods breathed courage into his soul"; and as he stretched out an indifferent hand toward Chloe's letters on the trunk, Roger Barnes had perhaps reached the highest point of his moral history; he had become conscious of himself as a moral being choosing good or evil; and he had chosen good.

It was not so much that his conscience accused him greatly with regard to Chloe.

For that his normal standards were not fine enough.

It was rather a kind of "serious call," something akin to conversion, or that might have been conversion, which befell him in this dusty room, amid the night-silence.
As he took up Chloe's letters he did not notice that the door had quietly opened behind him, and that a figure stood on the threshold.
A voice struck into the stillness.
"Roger!" He turned with a movement that scattered all his own letters on the floor.