cit passion?"

"I don't think that they atone; but they may redeem it, mayn't they? Why
do you ask me?" Augustine smiled;--"You know far more about these things
than I do."

She could not look at him. His words in their beautiful unconsciousness
appalled her. Yet she had to go on, to profit by her own trance-like
strength. She was walking on the verge of a precipice but she knew that
with steady footsteps she could go towards her appointed place. She must
see just where Augustine put her, just how he judged her.

"You seem to know more than I do, Augustine," she said: "I've not
thought it out as you have. And it seems to me that any great emotion is
more of an end in itself than you would grant. But if the illicit
passion thinks itself real and thinks itself enduring, and proves
neither, what of it then? What do you think of lovers to whom that
happens? It so often happens, you know."

Augustine had his cheerful answer ready. "Then they are stupid as well
as sinful. Of course it is sinful to be stupid. We've learned that from
Plato and Hegel, haven't we?"

The parlour-maid came out to announce lunch. Lady Channice was spared an
answer. She went to her room feeling shattered, as if great stones had
been hurled upon her.

Yes, she thought, gazing at herself in the mirror, while she untied her
scarf and smoothed her hair, yes, she had never yet, with all her
agonies of penitence, seen so clearly what she had been: a sinner: a
stupid sinner. Augustine's rigorous young theories might set too inhuman
an ideal, but that aspect of them stood out clear: he had put, in bald,
ugly words, what, in essence, her love for Paul Quentin had been: he had
stripped all the veils and wreaths away. It had been self; self, blind
in desire, cruel when blindness left it: there had been no real love and
no fidelity to redeem the baseness. A stupid sinner; that, her son had
told her, was what she had been. The horror of it smote back upon her
from her widened, mirrored eyes, and she sat for a moment thinking that
she must faint.

Then she remembered that Augustine was waiting for her downstairs and
that in little more than an hour her husband would be with her. And
suddenly the agony lightened. A giddiness of relief came over her. He
was kind: he did not judge her: he knew all, yet he respected her.
Augustine was like the bleak, stony moor; she must shut her eyes and
stumble on towards the firelight. And as she thought of that nearing
br