Step by step he went back over the road which they had walked together since their marriage, once so strewn with roses. Stately and splendid it had been as he trod it with her; they had walked it to the sound of flutes, and the beauty of all that was lovely in the world of art had been brought to adorn it. But looking back to-day it seemed that all he had thought lovely was blackened and grimed, and the hoofs of satyrs, leering and diabolical, had trodden the roses into the filth over which they had been laid. From the beginning there had been nothing true or real about it all; he had worshipped a monstrous thing, and its monstrosity had infected all that had come near it.
And then for a moment he would look on that sunbeam of a child again, and he would tell himself that there was nothing monstrous except his own stupendous disloyalty to Lucia.
These nightmares of thought came like repeated attacks of some nameless fever. But each weakened him; after each it was more difficult to rally, and he felt that he would go off his head altogether unless he could arrive at some certainty. Yet how was that to be done? Whatever Lucia had done, whether the truth was that he by his suspicions had so sinned against her, or whether it was she who had sinned against him, there was nothing that would satisfy him in the wounded and incredulous anger that must be her answer to any direct question of his. Since he entertained those vile suspicions of her, he necessarily would not be convinced—the evil part of him that suspected her, that is to say—by any indignant and fiery denial of hers. It could not be through her that his distrust must be set at rest; he must convince himself independently of her. He must frame to himself a definite suspicion, and—test it. Yet how mean! how abhorrent! What would be his own feelings if he found that Lucia had ever spied on him?
But the idea recurred and recurred again. He often put it away, but as often it came back. And he found by degrees that he was not putting it so far away as he did when first it presented itself.
He was busying himself the morning after his arrival at Brayton with that which had formed part of the cause of his coming, and was overhauling his photographic apparatus. He was more than a mere amateur at photography, and his equipment was singularly complete. There was a big full-plate camera, which
