l chatter in every normal mind are
suddenly dumb.

How was she going to face Ellesborough's long absence? It had been
recently assumed between them that he would be very soon released from
his forestry post, that the infantry commission he had been promised
would come to nothing, now the Armistice was signed, and that in a very
few weeks they would be free to think only of themselves and their own
future. This offer of Intelligence work at the American Headquarters had
changed everything.

In ten days, if nothing happened, he would be gone, and she would be left
behind to grapple alone with Roger--who might at any moment torment her
again; with the presence of Dempsey, who was thinking of settling in the
village, and for whom she would be called upon very soon to fulfil the
hopes she had raised in him; and finally, with the struggle and misery in
her own mind.

But something must happen. As she was dressing by candle-light in the
winter dawn, her thoughts were rushing forward--leaping some unexplored
obstacles lying in the foreground--to a possible marriage before
Ellesborough went to France; just a quiet walk to a registry office,
without any fuss or any witness but Janet. If she could reach that
haven, she would be safe; and this dumb fever of anxiety, this terrified
conviction that in the end Fate would somehow take him from her, would be
soothed away.

But how to reach it? For there was now between them, till they also were
revealed and confessed, a whole new series of events: not only the Tanner
episode, but Delane's reappearance, her interview with him, her rash
attempt to silence Dempsey. By what she had done in her bewilderment and
fear, in order to escape the penalty of frankness, she might only--as
she was now beginning to perceive--have stumbled into fresh dangers. It
was as though she stood on the friable edge of some great crater, some
gulf of destruction, on which her feet were perpetually slipping and
sinking, and only Ellesborough's hold could ultimately save her.

And Janet's--Janet's first. Rachel's thought clung to her, as the
shipwrecked Southern sailor turns to his local saint to intercede for him
with the greater spiritual lights. Janet's counsel and help--she knew she
must ask for them--that it was the next step. Yet she had been weakly
putting it off day by day. And through this mist of doubt and dread,
there kept striking all the time, as though quite independent of it, the
natural thought