question made
itself felt. "_How did he know?_"

That question was never answered by Fay, deeply though she pondered over
it. It remained a mystery to her all of her life. She recalled little
scraps of his conversation, tiny incidents which might have shown her
that he knew. But she had noticed nothing at the time. Her cheek burned
when she recalled his tranquil, sarcastic voice.

"Not on the high road. You are in the right. How dusty, how dirty, is
the high road! But I have known, not once, nor twice, women to murder
men very quietly. Oh! so gently and cleanly--to let them die."

When first she remembered those words of her dead husband, a horrible
revulsion of feeling against him seized her. She had been vaguely
miserable and remorseful at his death until those words, so tranquilly
spoken in a primrose dawn, came back to her.

Then she was suddenly glad he was dead, gone for ever. She almost hated
him once more. It was dreadful to live with people whom she did not
understand, who knew things they kept secret, whose minds and thoughts
and motives were incomprehensible to her, who believed horrible untrue
things of her. It had been a fixed idea with Fay during her husband's
lifetime that he believed horrible untrue things about her. But what
they were she would have found it difficult to say.

Fay's was not a suspicious nature in its normal state, but most persons
of feeble judgment become suspicious when life becomes difficult. They
cannot judge, and consequently cannot trust. Fay had never learnt even
so much of her husband as that she might have trusted him entirely. Now
that he was gone without betraying her, the knowledge that he had known
her secret and had guarded it faithfully did not make her feel, with a
flood of humble contrition, how deeply she had misjudged him, how loyal
he had been from first to last; it only aroused in her a sense of fear
and anger. How secretive Andrea had been, how underhand! Perhaps part of
the doom of a petty, self-centred nature is that it does not know when
it has been generously and humanely dealt with.

When Fay had somewhat recovered from the shock of her husband's dying
speech she had turned with all her might to Magdalen, had cast herself
upon her, clung to her in a sort of desperation. Magdalen at any rate
believed in her.

For many months after she came to Priesthope, her mind remained in a
kind of stupor, and it seemed at first as if she were regaining a sort
of cal