evolt, of distaste for imprisoning
circumstance. It came to him acutely, almost as if a voice had whispered
in his ear, warning him, urging him into the wild, to escape threatening
catastrophe. He determined to leave Myrtle Forge in the morning, to
return to the stream he had followed into the serene heart of the woods.
There he would stay until--until Ludowika Winscombe had gone. Howat had
no especial sense of danger from her; only for the moment she typified
the entire world of trivial artifice. He gazed at her with a conscious
detachment possible because of the rarity in his existence of such
figures as hers.

She had risen, and her cloak fallen upon the grass. Howat could see her
face beneath hair faintly powdered with silver dust and the ruffled
patch of white tied pertly under her chin. Her smoothly turning
shoulders, filmed in lawn, and low bodice crowned an extravagant
circumference of ruffled silk and rosettes. Against the night of the
Province, the invisible but felt presence of immutable hills, she was
like a puppet, a grotesque figure of comedy. He regarded her sombrely
from the step, his chin cupped in a hand.

But, again, she surprised him, speaking entirely out of the character he
had assigned her, in a spirit that seemed utterly incongruous, but which
was yet warm with conviction. "I want to explain a great deal to you,"
she said, "that really isn't explainable. It isn't sensible, and yet it
is the strongest feeling I remember. It's about here and you and me. You
can't picture my life, and so you don't know how strange this is, how
different from all I've ever lived.

"I think I told you I was born in Paris--you see some of us came to
France when Louis took a Polish princess, and there my mother married an
English gentleman. Well, it was always the Court, in France and in
England. Always the Court--do you know what that means? It's a place
where women are pretty pink and white candies that men are always
picking over. It's a great bed with a rose silk counterpane and closed
draperies. Champagne and music and scent and masques. Little plays with
the intrigue in the audience; favours behind green hedges. I was in it
when I was fourteen, and I had a lover the first year. He showed me how
to make pleasure. Don't think that I was indifferent to this," she added
directly; "that I wanted to escape it. I wasn't; I didn't. Only beneath
everything I had a feeling of not being completely satisfied; I
wanted--oh,