ary. They went in.

He sat opposite her, looking ashamed, with his eyes lowered, and the red
coming and going in his sunburned cheeks.

They talked for the sake of the servants, and she asked him whether
Hawes had been as lovely as ever and whether Lady Rockington's nerves
were better, and how their youngest boy (delicate from his birth) was
now.

Whilst she spoke her brain was turning, turning like a wheel; could she
only, for five minutes, think clearly, then might much after disaster be
avoided. She knew that in the conversation that was to come Roddy would
follow her lead and that it would be she who would be responsible for
all consequences.

She knew that and yet she could not force her brain to be clear nor
foresee what the end of it all was to be.

The dessert and the wine came at last and she went--

"I'll be in the library, Roddy," she said.

He gave her a quarter of an hour, and in that pause, with the house
quite silent all about her and the fire crackling and the lights softly
shining, she strove to discipline her mind.

She had known as soon as she had seen them there that the most awful
element in it was that this had in no way altered the earlier case--it
merely precipitated a crisis and demanded a definition. Nothing could
have proved to her that she had never loved Roddy so much as her own
feeling at this crisis towards him. Therein lay her own sin.

It was simply now of the future that she must think. The awful chasm
that might divide them after this night, were not their words most
carefully ordered, shook her with fear; peril to herself, for she could
stand aside and see herself quite clearly: and she knew that if to-night
she and he were to say things that they could neither of them afterwards
forget, then, for herself, and from her deep need of love and affection,
there was temptation awaiting her that no disguise could cover.

Then, as more clearly she figured the scene in the garden, patience
seemed difficult to command.

She hated Nita Raseley--that was no matter--but she despised Roddy, and
were he once to-night to see that contempt she knew that his after
remembrance of it would divide them more completely than anything else
could do.

When he came in she had still no clearer idea of what she intended to
say, or how she wished things to go. She was sitting in an arm-chair by
the fire with her hands shielding her face, and he sat down opposite her
and stared at her and cleared h