vered exasperation watched him clinging to the table for support.
Would he die--or faint--then and there--and be found by Janet, who must
now be on her way home? She pressed brandy on him again. But he pushed
it away. "Let me be!" She could only wait.

When he could speak and move again, he put the cheque away in his pocket,
and buttoned his coat over it.

"Well, good-night." Then straightening himself, he fixed her with a pair
of burning eyes. "Good-night. Anita will be kind to me--when I die--Anita
will be a woman to me. You were never kind--you never thought of any one
but yourself. Good-bye. Good luck!"

And walking uncertainly to the door, he opened it and was gone. She heard
his slow steps in the farmyard, and the opening of the wicket gate. Then
all sounds died away.

For a few minutes she crouched sobbing over the fire, weeping for sheer
nervous exhaustion. Then the dread seized her of being caught in such a
state by Janet, and she went upstairs, locked her door, and threw herself
on her bed. The bruise of an intolerable humiliation seemed to spread
through soul and body. She knew that for the first time she had confessed
her wretched secret which she had thought so wholly her own--and
confessed it--horrible and degrading thought!--to Roger Delane. Not in
words indeed--but in act. No innocent woman would have paid the
blackmail. The dark room in which she lay seemed to be haunted by
Delane's exultant eyes.

And the silence was haunted too by his last words. There arose in her a
reluctant and torturing pity for the wretched man who had been her
husband; a pity, which passed on into a storm of moral anguish. Her whole
past life looked incredibly black to her as she lay there in the
dark--stained with unkindness, and selfishness, and sin.

Which saw her the more truly?--Roger, or Ellesborough?--the man who hated
and cursed her, or the man who adored her?

She was struggling, manoeuvring, fighting, to keep the truth from George
Ellesborough. It was quite uncertain whether she would succeed. Roger's
word was a poor safeguard! But if she did, the truth itself would only
the more certainly pursue and beat her down.

And again, the utter yearning for confession and an unburdened soul came
upon her intolerably. The religious psychologist describes such a crisis
as "conversion," or "conviction of sin," or the "working of grace." And
he knows from long experience that it is the result in the human soul not
so much