on eating his
pheasant. I felt very bad; I imagined that it would be up to me to
propose to Nancy that evening. It appeared to me to be queer that they
had not given me any warning of Nancy's departure--But I thought that
that was only English manners--some sort of delicacy that I had not got
the hang of. You must remember that at that moment I trusted in Edward
and Leonora and in Nancy Rufford, and in the tranquility of ancient
haunts of peace, as I had trusted in my mother's love. And that evening
Edward spoke to me.

What in the interval had happened had been this:

Upon her return from Nauheim Leonora had completely broken down--because
she knew she could trust Edward. That seems odd but, if you know
anything about breakdowns, you will know that by the ingenious torments
that fate prepares for us, these things come as soon as, a strain having
relaxed, there is nothing more to be done. It is after a husband's long
illness and death that a widow goes to pieces; it is at the end of a
long rowing contest that a crew collapses and lies forward upon its
oars. And that was what happened to Leonora.

From certain tones in Edward's voice; from the long, steady stare that
he had given her from his bloodshot eyes on rising from the dinner table
in the Nauheim hotel, she knew that, in the affair of the poor girl,
this was a case in which Edward's moral scruples, or his social code,
or his idea that it would be playing it too low down, rendered Nancy
perfectly safe. The girl, she felt sure, was in no danger at all from
Edward. And in that she was perfectly right. The smash was to come from
herself.

She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first quickly, then with an
increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it that,
having been cut off from the restraints of her religion, for the first
time in her life, she acted along the lines of her instinctive desires.
I do not know whether to think that, in that she was no longer herself;
or that, having let loose the bonds of her standards, her conventions
and her traditions, she was being, for the first time, her own natural
self. She was torn between her intense, maternal love for the girl and
an intense jealousy of the woman who realizes that the man she loves has
met what appears to be the final passion of his life. She was divided
between an intense disgust for Edward's weakness in conceiving this
passion, an intense pity for the miseries that he was enduring, a