uilty, and
it seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, that for the first time Fulton
showed me a certain curtness of manner, as if he was not pleased at
finding me so often in his house.

XIX

With the knowledge that I loved Lucy and that she loved me, came also
the knowledge that for a long time the situation had been
inevitable--inevitable if we kept on being so much in each other's
company. Passages between us of words and looks now recurred to my
memory filled with portentous meaning. Oh, I thought, how could I have
been so blind! A fool must have seen it coming. I ought to have seen
it coming. I ought to have run from it as a man runs from a
conflagration. When Lucy told me that she no longer loved her husband
I ought to have known that the fault was mine, and I ought to have gone
to a far place, and left that little family to rehabilitate itself in
peace. Surely after a "blank" spell Lucy would have loved her husband
again.

But all the thoughts that I carried to bed with me that night were not
dark with remorse. It was possible for whole minutes of time,
especially between sleeping and waking, to forget the complications of
the situation and to bask in the blissful warmth of its serenities.
The laughter, the prayers, the adoration of Lucy's lovely eyes were
mine now. She loved me better than her children, better than life
itself. She had not said these things to me, she had looked them to
me. It was wonderful to feel that I had been trusted with so much that
was beautiful and precious.

Once a spoiled child, always a spoiled child. In the scheme of things
I _would_ not at first give their proper place to those awful barriers
which society has set up between a man and another man's wife. We
loved each other with might and main, and our only happiness could be
in passing over those barriers and belonging to each other. John
Fulton and his children were but vague pale shadows across the sunshine.

The sleep that I got that night, short though it was, was infinitely
refreshing. I waked with the feeling that happiness had at last come
into my life, and that I was not thirty-five years old, but twenty
years young.

I walked in my mother's garden waiting for servants to come downstairs
and make coffee for me and poach eggs. It was going to be a lovely
day. Already the sun had coaxed the tea-olives to give out their odor
of ripe peaches. "How she loves them," I thought. "If only she were
with