turned back towards the farm, drawing her cloak and its fur collar
close round her, against the cold. And indeed Ellesborough was no sooner
gone, the rush of the motor cycle along the distant road had no sooner
died away, than a shiver ran through her which was more than physical. So
long as he was there, she was happy, excited, hopeful. And when he was
not there, the protecting screen had fallen, and she was exposed to all
the stress and terror of the storm raging in her own mind.

"Why can't I forget it all--_everything_! It's dead--_it's dead_!" she
said to herself again and again in an anguish, as she walked back through
the broad open field where the winter-sown corn was just springing in the
furrows--the moon was so bright that she could see the tiny green spears
of it.

And yet in reality she perfectly understood why it was that, instead of
forgetting, memory was becoming more and more poignant, more and more
persecuting. It was because the searching processes of love were going
deeper and deeper into her inmost soul. This good man who loved her, who
was going to take her injured life into his keeping, to devote to her all
his future, and all the harvest of his upright and hard-working past--she
was going to marry him with a lie between them, so that she could never
look him straight in the face, never be certain that, sometime or other,
something would not emerge like a drowned face from the dark, and ruin
all their happiness. It had seemed, at the beginning, so easy to keep
silence, to tell everything but the one miserable fact that she couldn't
tell! And now it was getting intolerably hard, just because she knew
for the first time what love really meant, with its ardour for
self-revelation, for an absolute union with the beloved. By marrying him
without confession, she would not only be wronging him, she would be
laying up probable misery for herself--and him--through the mere action
of her own temperament.

For she knew herself. Among the girls and women she had been thrown with
during the preceding year and a half, there were some moral anarchists,
with whose views she had become strikingly familiar. Why, they said, make
so much of these physical facts? Accept them, and the incidents that
spring from them. Why all this weeping and wailing over supposed shames
and disgraces? The sex-life of the present is making its own new codes.
Who knows what they will ultimately be? And as for the indelible traces
and