ife became shackles. It was hardly shock, it was more like
some immense relief, when, in each other's arms, the words of love, so
long implied, were spoken. He said that she must come with him; that she
must leave it all and come. She fought against herself and against him
in refusing, grasping at pale memories of duty, honour, self-sacrifice;
he knew too well the inner treachery that denied her words. But, looking
back, trying not to flinch before the scorching memory, she did not know
how he had won her. The dreadful jostle of opportune circumstance; her
husband's absence, her brother's;--the chance pause in the empty London
house between country visits;--Paul Quentin following, finding her
there; the hot, dusty, enervating July day, all seemed to have pushed
her to the act of madness and made of it a willess yielding rather than
a decision. For she had yielded; she had left her husband's house and
gone with him.

They went abroad at once, to France, to the forest of Fontainebleau. How
she hated ever after the sound of the lovely syllables, hated the memory
of the rocks and woods, the green shadows and the golden lights where
she had walked with him and known horror and despair deepening in her
heart with every day. She judged herself, not him, in looking back; even
then it had been herself she had judged. Though unwilling, she had been
as much tempted by herself as by him; he had had to break down barriers,
but though they were the barriers of her very soul, her longing heart
had pressed, had beaten against them, crying out for deliverance. She
did not judge him, but, alone with him in the forest, alone with him in
the bland, sunny hotel, alone with him through the long nights when she
lay awake and wondered, in a stupor of despair, she saw that he was
different. So different; there was the horror. She was the sinner; not
he. He belonged to the bright, ardent life, the life without social bond
or scruple, the life of sunny, tolerant hotels and pagan forests; but
she did not belong to it. The things that had seemed external things,
barriers and shackles, were the realest things, were in fact the inner
things, were her very self. In yielding to her heart she had destroyed
herself, there was no life to be lived henceforth with this man, for
there was no self left to live it with. She saw that she had cut herself
off from her future as well as from her past. The sacred past judged her
and the future was dead. Years of exp