ington nearly every house was open
to the neighbourly hand. But of late Esther had taken to keeping her
bolt slipped. It had dated from the day Lydia made hostile entrance.
Finding he could not walk in unannounced, he stood for a moment, his
intention blank. It did not seem to him he could be named conventionally
to Esther, who was afraid of him. And then, by a hazard, Esther, who had
not been out for days, and yet had heard of nobody's meeting him abroad,
longed for the air and threw wide the door. There she was, by a
God-given chance. It was like predestined welcome, a confirming of his
hardihood. In spite of the sudden blight and shadow on her face,
instinctive recoil that meant, he knew, the closing of the door, he
grasped her hands, both her soft white hands, and seemed, to his
anguished mind, to be dragging himself in by them, and even in the face
of that look of hers was over the threshold and had closed the door.

"Esther," he said. "Esther, dear!"

The last word he had never expected to use to her, to any woman again.
Still she regarded him with that horrified aversion, not amazement, he
saw. It was as if she had perhaps expected him, had anticipated this
very moment, and yet was not ready, because, such was her hard case, no
ingenuity could possibly prepare her for it. This he saw, and it ran on
in a confirming horrible sequence from Reardon's speech.

"Esther!" he repeated. He was still holding her hands and feeling they
had no possibility of escape from each other, she in the weakness of her
fear and he in passionate ruth. "Are you afraid of me?"

That was her cue.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Were you always, dear?" he went on, carried by the tide of his
despairing love. (Or was it love? It seemed to him like love, for he had
not felt emotion such as this through the dry pangs of his isolation.)
"Years ago, when we were together--why, you weren't afraid then?"

"Oh, yes, I was," she said. Now that she could translate his emotion in
any degree, she felt the humility of his mind toward her, and began to
taste her own ascendancy. He was suing to her in some form, and the
instinct which, having something to give may yet withhold it, fed her
sense of power.

"Why, we were happy," said Jeffrey, in an agony of wonder. "That's been
my only comfort when I knew we couldn't be happy now. I made you happy,
dear."

And since he hung, in a fevered anticipation, upon her answer, she could
reply, still from that sen