"Will you rest before dinner? Do; I shall feel more easy
in my conscience if I inflict Hegel on you afterwards."

III

Lady Channice did not go and rest. She sat on in the shadowy room gazing
before her, her hands still clasped, her face wearing still its look of
fear. For twenty years she had not known what it was to be without fear.
It had become as much a part of her life as the air she breathed and any
peace or gladness had blossomed for her only in that air: sometimes she
was almost unconscious of it. This afternoon she had become conscious.
It was as if the air were heavy and oppressive and as if she breathed
with difficulty. And sitting there she asked herself if the time was
coming when she must tell Augustine.

What she might have to tell was a story that seemed strangely
disproportionate: it was the story of her life; but all of it that
mattered, all of it that made the story, was pressed into one year long
ago. Before that year was sunny, uneventful girlhood, after it grey,
uneventful womanhood; the incident, the drama, was all knotted into one
year, and it seemed to belong to herself no longer; she seemed a
spectator, looking back in wonder at the disaster of another woman's
life. A long flat road stretched out behind her; she had journeyed over
it for years; and on the far horizon she saw, if she looked back, the
smoke and flames of a burning city--miles and miles away.

Amabel Freer was the daughter of a rural Dean, a scholarly, sceptical
man. The forms of religion were his without its heart; its heart was her
mother's, who was saintly and whose orthodoxy was the vaguest symbolic
system. From her father Amabel had the scholar's love of beauty in
thought, from her mother the love of beauty in life; but her loves had
been dreamy: she had thought and lived little. Happy compliance, happy
confidence, a dawn-like sense of sweetness and purity, had filled her
girlhood.

When she was sixteen her father had died, and her mother in the
following year. Amabel and her brother Bertram were well dowered.
Bertram was in the Foreign Office, neither saintly nor scholarly, like
his parents, nor undeveloped like his young sister. He was a capable,
conventional man of the world, sure of himself and rather suspicious of
others. Amabel imagined him a model of all that was good and lovely. The
sudden bereavement of her youth bewildered and overwhelmed her; her
capacity for dependent, self-devoting love sought for a