Foes in Law

Excerpt from Foes in Law
The morning-room is comfortable, but so are not its occupants - only two - of whom the one has within the last five minutes sprung a mine upon the other. It must have been inside this small time-limit since the clock on the narrow eighteenth-century mantelpiece had struck the half-hour, while the footmen were carrying in the last lamp and dropping the last curtain. This had happened before the catastrophe, and the index is now only midway between the figures that indicate respectively five and twenty and twenty to six. Yet within that interval the relations between the two persons, lately lounging in the comfortable ease of established intimacy in their several arm-chairs, has undergone an earthquake change. She will never forget that, instead of a cup of tea, he has asked her for herself; and he will probably always remember that she has kindly, and not very firmly, declined. He has risen, and is standing with his back to the fire, sadly and absently parting his clerical coat-tails with an unconscious aspiration after warmth of some kind, if not of the particular quality he has demanded.