om whose love and
sympathy she could draw the strength which at this point she so greatly
needed. She had a husband, a lover, a mother--to none of these could she
go with the truth. It needed all Sally's egotism to make the truth seem
capable of justification, or indeed to make it seem even credible, so
different is the standard by which we judge our own actions from that
which we apply to others. Sally saw everything so much in relation to
all that she had ever thought and felt that she could not understand how
her impulses might horrify one coming to them only after translation
into action. She only knew that she could not betray herself
unreservedly to anybody with the hope of being found innocent. The
knowledge made her at first full of terror; and the terror and the
successive elaborate self-explanation, given to an unresponsive silence
which she could easily suppose to be hostile, made her obstinate; then
she became the more passionately afraid. She could have stormed, lied,
wriggled; but she could never hope to escape the consequences that she
dreaded.

At times Sally could not bear to be with Gaga at all. She told him she
was ill, and that the doctor said she must go out; and in spite of his
protests she would run from the house and walk rapidly for an hour about
Kensington, and even into Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. The weather
made no difference to her. She was desperate, and must seek some relief
from the horror of being cooped up in that house with her secret. She
had begged the doctor to give no hint of it to Gaga, and had tried to
pretend to herself that he had been mistaken in his diagnosis; but her
pretence was of no avail, because each day she became more certain that
he had been right. And still she could not think of any way out. She had
been betrayed by a single act of irresistible passion.

Presently, as her frenzy spent itself, Sally began to think more
collectedly. She remembered Toby's last letter. She began to think of
him. She thought even that she could run away and be divorced and
abandon all her schemes for the sake of the baby. But as soon as Sally
had such an imagining she knew that it was an impossibility for her.
Only as a last resource could she accept her disaster. All her
self-confidence fought against it. She must find some other way. At
first she thought it would be simple to do so; but as her brain worked
upon the problem she found so many difficulties in the way that she
ag