t step against which we are even
now striking our feet.

But poor Fay saw her life only as shattered, meaningless fragments,
confused, mutilated masses without coherence. The masses and the gaps
between them were of the same substance in her eyes. She wandered into
her past as a child might wander among the rubbish heaps of its old home
in ruins. She was vaguely conscious that there had been a design once in
those unsightly mounds, that she had once lived in them. On that remnant
of crazy wall clung a strip of wall-paper which she recognised as the
paper in her own nursery; here a vestige of a staircase that had led to
her mother's room. And as a child will gather up a little frockful of
sticks and fallen remnants, and then drop them when they prove heavy, so
Fay picked up out of her past tiny disjointed odds and ends of ideas and
disquieting recollections, only to cast them aside again as burdensome
and useless.

The point to which she wandered back most frequently--to stare blankly
at it without comprehension--was her husband's appeal to her on his
deathbed. To-night she had gone back to it again as to a tottering wall.
She had worn a little pathway over heaps of miserable conjectures and
twisted memories towards that particular place.

She saw again the duke's dying face, and the tender fixity of his eyes.
She could almost hear his difficult waning voice saying:

"The sun shines. He does not see them, the spring and the sunshine.
Since a year he does not see them. Francesca, how much longer will you
keep your Cousin Michael in prison?"

_Since a year he does not see them._

It was two years now.

The shock to Fay at the moment those words were spoken had been that her
husband had known all the time. That revelation blotted out all other
thoughts for the time being. It even blotted out all considerations of
her own conduct towards Michael, which it might conceivably have
rendered acute. It made her mind incapable of receiving the impression
that the duke had perhaps hoped his deliberate last words might make on
it; that surely she would not, after his death, still keep Michael in
his cell. Throughout the early weeks of her widowhood Fay remained as
one stunned. Even Magdalen, who hurried out to her, supposed at first
that she was stunned by grief.

"Then Andrea knew all the time." That was the constant refrain of her
bewildered, half-paralysed mind.

Gradually in the quiet monotonous life at Priesthope the