It was
possible that love was still there--she did not know--she was too young
to understand the complex sensations which suddenly had made a woman of
her ... but it was a joyless love now: and all that she knew of a
certainty about her own feelings at the present was that she hoped she
would never have to gaze into her lover's face again ... and ... Heaven
help her! ... that he might never touch her again with his lips.

Obedient to his behests--hurriedly spoken as she stepped into the chaise
at Dover after the marriage ceremony--she had wandered out every
evening beyond the ha-ha into the park, on the chance of meeting him.

The evenings now were soft and balmy after the rain: the air carried a
pungent smell of dahlias and of oak-leaved geraniums to her nostrils,
which helped her to throw off that miserable feeling of mental lassitude
which had weighed her down ever since that fateful day at Dover. She
walked slowly along, treading the young tendrils of the moss, watching
with wistful eyes the fleecy clouds, as they appeared through the
branches of the elms, scurrying swiftly out towards the sea ... out
towards freedom.

But evening after evening passed away, and she saw no sign of him. She
felt the futility, the humiliating uselessness of these nightly
peregrinations in search of a man who seemed to have a hundred more
desirable occupations than that of meeting his wife. But she had not the
power to drift out towards freedom now. She obeyed mechanically because
she must. She had sworn to obey and he had bidden her come and wait for
him.

August yielded to September, the oak-leaved geraniums withered whilst
from tangled bosquets the melancholy eyes of the Michaelmas daisies
peeped out questioningly upon the coming autumn.

Then one evening his voice suddenly sounded close to her ear, causing
her to utter a quickly-smothered cry. It had been the one dull day
throughout this past glorious month, the night was dark and a warm
drizzle had soaked through to her shoulders and wetted the bottom of her
kirtle so that it hung heavy and dank round her ankles. He had come to
her as usual from out the gloom, just as she was about to cross the
little bridge which spanned the sunk fence.

She realized then, with one of those sudden quivers of her
sensibilities, to which, alas! she had become so accustomed of late,
that he had always met her thus in the gloom--always chosen nights when
she could scarce see him distinctly, an