reat desire to be alone. She wanted to pray, as she had
prayed in that room at Scarby on the morning of her discovery. Not that
she felt in the least as she had felt then. She was more profoundly
wounded--wounded beyond passion and beyond tears, calm and self-contained
in her vision of the inevitable, the fore-ordained reality. She had to
get rid of her vision; it was impossible to live with it, impossible to
live through another hour like the last. Her desire to pray was a
terrible, urgent longing that consumed her, impatient of every minute
that kept her from her prayer. She controlled it, moving slowly as she
took off her outdoor clothes and put them decorously away; feeling that
the force of her prayer gathered and mounted behind these minute
obstructions and delays.

She knelt down by her bed. She had been used to pray there with her eyes
fixed upon the crucifix which he had given her. It hung low, almost
between the pillows of their bed. Now she closed her eyes to shut it from
her sight. It was then that she realised what had been done to her. With
the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot
room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid,
that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made
visible. The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady
Cayley. Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into
the red, vaporous light. She could not see her husband, but she had a
sickening sense that he was there, looming, and that his image, too,
would leap into sight at some signal of her unwilling thought. She knew
that that back room would remain, built up indestructibly in the fabric
of her mind. It would be set apart for ever for the phantom of her
husband and her husband's mistress. By a tremendous effort of will she
shut the door on it. There it must be for ever, but wherever she looked,
she would not look there; much less allow herself to dwell in the unclean
place. It was not to think of that woman, his mistress, that she had gone
down on her knees. To think of her was contamination. After all, the
woman had no power over her inner life. She was not forced to think of
her. She had her sanctuary and her way of escape.

But before she could get there she had to struggle against the fatigue
which came of her effort not to think. Once she would have resigned
herself to this physical lassitude, mistaking it for the sinki