his wrist or the tiny trefoil-shaped birthmark on his temple, as
if that summed up for her the essence of his personality, and
were more truly Bernard Clowes then his intemperate insignificance
of speech. . . . Even when others suffered for it she yielded to
Bernard, because she loved him and because he suffered so infinitely
worse than they.

For denial maddened him. He raised himself on his arm, crimson
with anger, his chest heaving under the thin silken jacket which
defined his gaunt ribs--"Sit down, will you, damn you?" Because
Laura believed that she and she only stood between her husband
and despair, she yielded and began to read out the Times leader
in a voice that was perfectly gentle and placid.

Bernard sank back and watched her like a cat after a mouse. He
was under no delusion: he knew she was not cowed or nervous, but
that the spring of her devotion was pity--pity ever fed anew by
his dreadful helplessness: and it was this knowledge that drove
him into brutality. The instincts of possession and domination
were strong in him, and but for the accident that wrenched his
mind awry he would probably have made himself a king to Laura,
for, once her master, he would have grown more gentle and more
tender as the years went by, while Laura was one of those women
who find happiness in love and duty: not a weak woman, not a
coward, but a humble-minded woman with no great opinion of her
own judgment, who would have liked to look up to father, brother,
sister, husband, as better and wiser than herself. But in his
present avatar he could not master her: and Clowes, feeling as
she felt, seeing himself as she saw him, came sometimes as near
madness as any man out of an asylum. He was not far off it now,