to what had happened the implacable outline of
reality. He was gone; he would not come back; and her life had ended
just as she had dreamed it was beginning. She had no doubt, at first, as
to the absolute inevitability of this conclusion. The man who had driven
away from her house in the autumn dawn was not the man she had loved; he
was a stranger with whom she had not a single thought in common. It was
terrible, indeed, that he wore the face and spoke in the voice of her
friend, and that, as long as he was under one roof with her, the mere
way in which he moved and looked could bridge at a stroke the gulf
between them. That, no doubt, was the fault of her exaggerated
sensibility to outward things: she was frightened to see how it enslaved
her. A day or two before she had supposed the sense of honour was her
deepest sentiment: if she had smiled at the conventions of others it was
because they were too trivial, not because they were too grave. There
were certain dishonours with which she had never dreamed that any pact
could be made: she had had an incorruptible passion for good faith and
fairness.

She had supposed that, once Darrow was gone, once she was safe from the
danger of seeing and hearing him, this high devotion would sustain her.
She had believed it would be possible to separate the image of the man
she had thought him from that of the man he was. She had even foreseen
the hour when she might raise a mournful shrine to the memory of the
Darrow she had loved, without fear that his double's shadow would
desecrate it. But now she had begun to understand that the two men were
really one. The Darrow she worshipped was inseparable from the Darrow
she abhorred; and the inevitable conclusion was that both must go, and
she be left in the desert of a sorrow without memories...

But if the future was thus void, the present was all too full. Never had
blow more complex repercussions; and to remember Owen was to cease to
think of herself. What impulse, what apprehension, had sent him suddenly
to Paris? And why had he thought it needful to conceal his going from
her? When Sophy Viner had left, it had been with the understanding that
he was to await her summons; and it seemed improbable that he would
break his pledge, and seek her without leave, unless his lover's
intuition had warned him of some fresh danger. Anna recalled how
quickly he had read the alarm in her face when he had rushed back to her
sitting-room with the ne