But she had probed, insisted,
cross-examined, not rested till she had dragged the secret to the light.
She was one of the luckless women who always have the wrong audacities,
and who always know it...

Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself in that
way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a sense of demoniac
possession, and there flashed through her the longing to return to her
old state of fearless ignorance. If at that moment she could have kept
Darrow from following her to Givre she would have done so...

But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and she felt
herself reassured, rehabilitated. He arrived toward dusk, and she
motored to Francheuil to meet him. She wanted to see him as soon as
possible, for she had divined, through the new insight that was in her,
that only his presence could restore her to a normal view of things.
In the motor, as they left the town and turned into the high-road, he
lifted her hand and kissed it, and she leaned against him, and felt
the currents flow between them. She was grateful to him for not saying
anything, and for not expecting her to speak. She said to herself: "He
never makes a mistake--he always knows what to do"; and then she thought
with a start that it was doubtless because he had so often been in such
situations. The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertness
filled her with repugnance, and insensibly she drew away from him. He
made no motion to bring her nearer, and she instantly thought that
that was calculated too. She sat beside him in frozen misery, wondering
whether, henceforth, she would measure in this way his every look and
gesture. Neither of them spoke again till the motor turned under the
dark arch of the avenue, and they saw the lights of Givre twinkling at
its end. Then Darrow laid his hand on hers and said: "I know, dear--"
and the hardness in her melted. "He's suffering as I am," she thought;
and for a moment the baleful fact between them seemed to draw them
closer instead of walling them up in their separate wretchedness.

It was wonderful to be once more re-entering the doors of Givre with
him, and as the old house received them into its mellow silence she had
again the sense of passing out of a dreadful dream into the reassurance
of kindly and familiar things. It did not seem possible that these quiet
rooms, so full of the slowly-distilled accumulations of a fastidious
taste, should have been the