t twelve, Leonora glanced
at her daughter, who reclined on the sofa at the foot of the beds; the
girl had fallen into a doze.

John's condition was unchanged; the doctor had said that he might
possibly survive for many hours. He lay on his back, with open eyes, and
damp face and hair; his arms rested inert on the sheet; and underneath
that thin covering his chest rose and fell from time to time, with a
scarcely perceptible movement. It seemed to Leonora that she could
realise now what had happened and what was to happen. In the nocturnal
solemnity of the house filled with sleeping and quiescent youth, she who
was so mature and so satiate had the sensation of being alone with her
mate. Images of Arthur Twemlow did not distract her. With the full
strength of her mind she had shut an iron door on the episode in the
garden; it was as though it had never existed. And she gazed at John
with calm and sad compassion. 'I would not sell my home,' she reflected,
'and here is the consequence of refusal.' She wished she had
yielded--and she could perceive how unimportant, comparatively,
bricks-and-mortar might be--but she did not blame herself for not having
yielded. She merely regretted her sensitive obstinacy as a misfortune
for both of them. She had a vision of humanity in a hurried procession,
driven along by some force unseen and ruthless, a procession in which
the grotesque and the pitiable were always occurring. She thought of
John standing over Meshach with the cold towel, and of Meshach passing
the flame across John's dying eyes, and these juxtapositions appeared to
her intolerably mournful in their ridiculous grimness.

Impelled by a physical curiosity, she lifted the sheet and scrutinised
John's breast, so pallid against the dark red of his neck, and bent down
to catch the last tired efforts of the heart within. And the idea of her
extraordinary intimacy with this man, of the incessant familiarity of
more than twenty years, struck her and overwhelmed her. She saw that
nothing is so subtly influential as constant uninterrupted familiarity,
nothing so binding, and perhaps nothing so sacred. It was a trifle that
they had not loved. They had lived. Ah! she knew him so profoundly that
words could not describe her knowledge. He kept his own secrets,
hundreds of them; and he had, in a way, astounded and shocked her by his
suicide. Yet, in another way, this miserable termination did not at all
surprise her; and his secrets were