t ardent and passionate lover; she had tried to respond
and had hidden, as best she could, her failure.

Then, suddenly, with the time of their going abroad, passion had left
him; it had left him as swiftly as the passing of wind over a hill. It
was there--it was gone.

But he remained the perfect husband. His kindness, his charm, his
simplicity, his affection for her--an affection that could never for an
instant be doubted--these things had delighted her. He was now the
friend, the strong reliant companion that she had wanted him to be.
During those first weeks in Italy and Greece happiness might have come
to her had she not been stirred by her remembrance of the earlier weeks.
The passion that had been in him, although it had not touched her, now
in retrospect lit fires for her imagination. Instantly back to her had
come the whole disquiet and unrest. The things that Roddy called from
her now, she suddenly discovered with a great shrinking alarm, were all
the Beaminster things. All the true emotions, qualities, traditions that
made up her secret life were roused in her by their own inherent
vitality, never by his evocation of them. _He_ was Beaminster--Roddy was
Beaminster. With his kindness and courtesy his eyes saw the world with
the eyes of his ancestors, his tongue spoke the language that had in it
no sincerity, his heart wished for all the ceremonies and lies that the
Beaminster had believed in since the beginning of time.

But her discovery did not lead her much further. She had, in her heart
of hearts, always known that Roddy was a Beaminster. Why then had she
married him? She had married him because she had been untrue to herself,
because she had herself encouraged the Beaminster blood in her to blind
her eyes, because she had desired deceit rather than truth, because she
had wanted the comfort that the man could give her rather than the man
himself, because she had muffled and stifled and silenced that Power in
her--the Power that made her restless and unquiet; the Power that was as
hostile to the Beaminster faith as heaven is to hell--

And yet this vehemence of explanation did not altogether explain Roddy.
Roddy was not _simply_ a Beaminster like Uncle John or Uncle Richard or
Aunt Adela. There was an elemental direct emotion in Roddy that was
exactly opposed to Beaminster conventionality.

These two elements in him puzzled and even frightened her. His attitude
during that first fortnight of their marri