Algernon Blackwood

“ He understood that resigned expression in her suffering face, and his mind dashed headlong for another chance of safety. “And, do remember one thing, Minnie: Mabel is nothing but a niece⁠—”
“My niece,” was the frigid rejoinder, like a steel trap closing on his heart. “Mabel is no relation to you at all. And, what’s more, James, you know perfectly well that the wretched girl’s in love with you into the bargain. So there!” ”

“ There is a peculiar sense of exasperation in being accused of something you have not done when yet the look of the thing is hopelessly against you. That to say, you have done it, only not in the way you stand accused of. A basis of hard fact is there, of course: you have been seen, heard, caught, but the rest is stupid misunderstanding, The stupider the more dangerous. ”

“ It’d hug a poker or a cushion or anything that was close enough.” He felt obliged to stick to his simile. They stared hard into each other’s eyes for nearly half a minute. “Minnie,” he went on, with the gravity of ultimate truth in voice and eyes and manner, “this one thing you shall and must believe of me: that, since we married, I have neither kissed nor wanted to kiss a single living thing but you. And that’s the truth.”
He pause to note the effect of this. Surely an intuitive woman, he felt, must recognise truth when she hears it. ”