evitable deed which is struggling to come forth, to be allowed to live
for our healing and comfort.

But there is another travail of soul, barren, unavailing, which flings
itself down, and tosses in impotent misery from side to side, from mood
to mood, as in a sickly trance.

Such was Fay's.

Her decision not to speak had been made in the moment when she had let
Michael accuse himself, and she kept silence. But that she did not know.
She thought it was still to make.

"I must speak. I must speak," she said to herself all through the
endless day after Michael's arrest, all through the endless night, until
the dawn came up behind the ilexes, the tranquil dawn that knew all, and
found her shuddering and wild-eyed.

"I must speak. I cannot let Michael suffer for me, even to save my
reputation."

_Her reputation!_ How little she had cared for it twenty-four hours ago,
when passion clutched the reins!

But now---- The public shame of it--the divorce which in her eyes must
ensue--Andrea! Her courteous, sedate, inexorable husband, whose will she
could not bend, whom she could not cajole, whose mind was a closed book
to her; a book which had lain by her hand for three years, which she had
never had the curiosity to open!--Fay feared her husband, as we all fear
what we do not understand. He would divorce her--and then---- And
Magdalen at home--and----

A flood of suffocating emotion swept over her, full of ugly swimming and
crawling reptiles, and invertebrate horrors, the inevitable scavengers
of the sea of selfish passion.

Fay shrank back for very life. She could not pass through that flood and
live. Nevertheless she felt herself pushed towards it.

"But I have no choice. I _must_ speak. He is innocent. He is doing this
to shield me because he loves me. But I also love him, far, far more
than he loves me, and I will prove it."

Fay went in imagination through a fearful and melodramatic scene, in
which she revealed everything before a public tribunal. She saw her
husband's face darken against her, her lover's lighten as she saved him.
She saw her slender figure standing alone, bearing the whole shock,
serene, unshaken. The vision moved her to tears.

Was it a prophetic vision?

It was quite light now, and she crept to her husband's room. She had not
seen him during the previous day. He had been out the whole of it. She
felt drawn towards him by calamity, by the loneliness of her misery.

The duke was not asleep