The blood mounted slowly in his cheeks.

Bianca's eyes fastened themselves on that flush.

Whether or no--as philosophers say--little things are all big with the past, of whose chain they are the latest links, they frequently produce what apparently are great results.
The marital relations of Hilary and his wife, which till then had been those of, at all events, formal conjugality, changed from that moment.
After ten o'clock at night their lives became as separate as though they lived in different houses.

And this change came about without expostulations, reproach, or explanation, just by the turning of a key; and even this was the merest symbol, employed once only, to save the ungracefulness of words.

Such a hint was quite enough for a man like Hilary, whose delicacy, sense of the ridiculous, and peculiar faculty of starting back and retiring into himself, put the need of anything further out of the question.