Hearing her husband's steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression.

She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview.

She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days--to sort out the children's things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's--and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, "that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step" to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her.