t."

"It is that."

He came towards the sofa and stood by it looking down at her.

"I told you just now, Adela, that you couldn't surprise me. What you
have done in connexion with Beryl Van Tuyn has not surprised me. I
always knew you were capable of such a thing; yes, even of a thing as
fine as that. Thank God you have had your opportunity. Of course you
took it. But thank God you have had it."

"I had to take it. I couldn't do anything else."

"Of course _you_ couldn't."

She got up. She did not know why. She just felt that she had to get up.
Seymour put his hands on her shoulders.

"Have you ever wondered why I was able to go on loving you?" he asked
her.

"Yes, very often."

"Well, now perhaps you won't wonder any more."

And he lifted his hands from her shoulders. But he stood there for a
moment looking at her. And in his eyes she read her reward.

CHAPTER XI

Early on the following morning, soon after ten o'clock Miss Van Tuyn was
startled by a knock on her bedroom door. Everything at all unexpected
startled her just now. Her nerves, as even old Fanny could not help
noticing, had gone "all to pieces." She lived in perpetual fear. Nearly
all the previous night she had been lying awake turning over and over in
her mind the horrible possibilities of the future. It was in vain that
she tried to call her normal common sense to the rescue, in vain that
she tried to look at facts calmly, to sum them up dispassionately, and
to draw from them reasonable conclusions. She could not be reasonable.
Her brain said to her: "You have no reason for fear. You are perfectly
safe. Your folly and wilfulness, your carelessness of opinion, your
reckless spirit of defiant independence, your ugly and abominable
desires"--her brain did not spare her--"might easily have brought you
to irretrievable ruin. They might have destroyed you. But Fate has
intervened to protect you. You have been saved from the consequences of
your own imprudence--to call it by no other name. Give thanks to the God
of luck, and to the woman who sacrificed her pride for your sake, and
live differently in the future." Her brain, in fact, told her she was
saved. But something else that she could not classify, something still
and remote and persistent, told her that she was in great danger. She
said to herself, thinking of Arabian: "What can he do? I am my own
mistress. If I choose to cut him dead he must accept my decision to have
nothing more to do