t was neither real nor unreal, as
in a dream that led her, now through cool, deep forests, beside clear,
sparkling streams where all was a great peace and the soul was at rest,
serene, untroubled, now into desolate places where misery had its birth
and shame was, where there was fear, and the mind stood staggered and
appalled and lost and knew not how to guide her that she might flee from
it all.

At moments most unexpected, as now when motoring with Thornton in the
car that he had brought back with him on, his return to Needley, when
laughing at the Flopper's determined pursuit of Mamie Rodgers, when
engaged in the homely, practical details of housekeeping about the
cottage, there came flashing suddenly upon her the picture of Mrs.
Thornton lying on the brass bed in the car compartment that night, every
line of the pale, gentle face as vivid, as actual as though it were once
more before her in reality, and in her ears rang again, stabbing her
with their unmeant condemnation, those words of sweetness, love and
purity that held her up to gaze upon herself in ghastly, terrifying
mockery.

It stupified her, bewildered her, frightened her. She seemed, for days
and weeks now, to be drifting with a current that, eddying, swirling,
swept her this way and that. How wonderful it was, this life she was now
leading compared with the old life--so full of the better things, the
better emotions, the better thoughts that she had never known before!
How monstrous in its irony that she was leading it to _steal_, that she
might play her part in a criminal scheme for a criminal end! And yet,
somehow, it did not all seem sham, this part she played--and that very
thought, too, frightened her. Why was it now that Madison's
oft-attempted, and as oft-repulsed, kiss upon her lips was something
from which she shrank and battled back, no longer from a sense of pique
or to bring him to his knees, but because something new within her,
intangible, that she did not understand, rose up against it! Why did she
do this--she, who had known the depths, who had known no other guide or
mentor than the turbulent, passionate love she had yielded him and in
her abandonment had once found contentment! Was her love for him gone?
Or, if it was not that--what was it?

What was it? A week, another, two more, a month had slipped away since
Thornton had returned, and there had been so much of genuineness crowded
into this sham part of hers that it seemed at times