They stood by the hearth in the sitting-room, and on the lips of both came and went a peculiar smile.
It was difficult to contemplate too seriously a person with whom one had lived for years, with whom one had experienced in common the range of human passion, intimacy, and estrangement, who knew all those little daily things that men and women living together know of each other, and with whom in the end, without hatred, but because of one's nature, one had ceased to live.

There was nothing for either of them to find out, and with a little smile, like the smile of knowledge itself, Jaspar Bellew and Helen his wife looked at each other.
"Well," she said again; "what have you come for ?" Bellew's face had changed.

Its expression was furtive; his mouth twitched; a furrow had come between his eyes.
"How--are--you ?" he said in a thick, muttering voice.
Mrs.Bellew's clear voice answered: "Now, Jaspar, what is it that you want ?" The little brown devils leaped up again in Jaspar's face.
"You look very pretty to-night!" His wife's lips curled.
"I'm much the same as I always was," she said.
A violent shudder shook Bellew.

He fixed his eyes on the floor a little beyond her to the left; suddenly he raised them.

They were quite lifeless.
"I'm perfectly sober," he murmured thickly; then with startling quickness his eyes began to sparkle again.