Explore "The Valley of the Shadow" by H.C. McNeile on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For the twentieth time Hilda Garling asked herself the same question-Why / had her husband asked Jack Denver to stay? Mechanically she helped / herself to some dish which the footman was handing to her, hardly / knowing what it was she took. Why had he asked Jack to stay?
Such a thing was so completely foreign to her husband's habits of late. / For the last year or so he had grown more and more of a recluse, / shutting himself away for hours and even days at a time, and having his / meals served in his own room, until the big house standing back from the / Portsmouth road had seemed a veritable prison to his wife. Not that it / was much better when her husband did come out of his seclusion, but at / any rate he was a human being of her own class.