She wished to have him abase himself before her. Very well, he would.

‘I have admitted my transgression with Miss Trent, towards whom I did, I admit, experience some feelings for a time. Though that is now passed.’

What it cost him to say these words. It seemed to him his broken heart must show as vividly as a scar upon his face. He looked directly at his wife, begging her to see it, his broken heart, terrified lest she did.

‘There has been no other,’ he said.

But he was a little frightened of her. She seemed to be someone he did not know. He saw again, around the edges of her, some strange madness.

‘I do not believe you. The child—’

‘The child,’ he interrupted, reaching for the newspaper, last Wednesday’s newspaper, and thrusting it into her hands, ‘is not mine.’

She continued to stare at him. Finally she looked down at the newspaper in her hand, at the page it was folded to. On a little chain about her neck hung a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles that he had never seen before and that she placed now on her nose. She made no comment as she read, but he saw from a faint rippling of the muscles around her throat, from a stiffness that came into her spine, that she understood.

Her face had gone quite white, even her lips.

When she had read it she turned about and left his room. Alasdair reached behind him for his chair and sat down and did not stir for a time. He ought to be angry with her, furious. But instead he reached for the newspaper. The story was an insignificant piece; variations of it—a different name, minor details altered—appeared in the newspaper every day. But this one had made him stop and read:

SUICIDE OF A PRISONER

Yesterday an inquest was held at Darlinghurst Gaol on the body of Millicent Nimrod, whose death took place at that institution on Wednesday last. Evidence showed the prisoner had committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell using lengths of sheet tied together to make a rope. Deceased was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for malicious damage to property, her third such offence, and had recently given birth to a child, the fate of the child being unknown. A verdict of suicide while insane was returned.

He folded the newspaper and put it away. The story saddened him. He had not known the woman but her sister had, presumably, been their maid, Alice Nimrod, and now Alice was gone and he had an idea his wife had been responsible for the girl’s sudden departure.