y to Roddy; she had
found that at every turn her duty to Roddy involved more than any
determination could force her to give.

She had not known what that last interview with Breton would do to every
situation that followed it. It seemed to her then that those last words
with him would make her duty plain, they had only made her duty harder.

She could not now act, think, sleep, move but that last kiss, those last
words of his, that last vision of him standing, struggling so finely for
control--these things pursued her, caught her eyes and held them.

All her duty to Roddy could not hide from her now that she had, at one
flaming instant, known what life at its most intense could be. She had
felt the fire--how cold to her now these antechambers, these passages so
chill, so far from that inner room. Lizzie had then occurred to her as
the strongest person she knew. She sent for Lizzie, found instantly that
Lizzie disliked her, suspected then that Lizzie knew about Breton.

She knew Lizzie for her enemy.... During the last week also she had
detected a new attitude in Roddy; she had felt in him some active
growing impatience that quite definitely threatened her safety. That
wild lawlessness in Roddy that she had always known, that had produced
the Nita episode and others, was now turning towards herself.

But most of all did she fear her thoughts of Breton. She drove him again
and again and again from her mind, she called all her strength, mental,
moral, and physical, to her aid--always, with a smile, with one glance
from his eyes he defeated her.

Day and night he was with her, and yet at her heart she did not even now
know whether it were Francis Breton whom she loved, or the life with
Roddy, the whole Beaminster scheme of things that she hated. Every day
it seemed to her that Lizzie was more watchful, Roddy more impatient,
Breton more insistent--but afraid of them all as she was, fear of
herself gave her the sharpest terror.

She rang for tea, reproached them because they had waited for her. Then
they were--all three of them--silent.

One of the footmen brought in the five o'clock post with the tea and
laid Rachel's letters on the table at her side.

Lizzie had leant across the table for something and saw, as though
flashed to her by some special designing Providence, that the letter on
the top of the pile was in Francis Breton's handwriting.

Rachel, busied with tea, had not looked down. Now she did so; the
han