der he was always urging her to go home--haunted as he was by the
feeling of having put her in a prison and, no wonder, not having his
iron character, she had finally succumbed--as she so often succumbed to
his unselfishness.

How she was loving England! The wet, heavy air--the sky curtained with
clouds--the drenched leaves--the saturated flowers--the damp breathing
earth--the distant lethargic sun. She could feel a pulse in the sopping
soil and her heart beat with it.

Finding her friends too was such an adventure. What struck her most
about them was that they seemed so stationary. There they were, just as
she had left them, doing the same things, thinking the same things,
saying the same things--fixed points with their lives revolving round
them, seeming to have lost the capacity for independent motion.

She and Robert were not like that. Thank God, they were still pilgrims.
After all, her life had been a big spacious thing in spite of India,
because of India and, even more, because of Robert. Only she did not
want to think about it now. Just to go on repeating to herself: "I'm at
home. I'm in England."

And she was going to stay with St. John. How excited she would have been
four years ago. How her heart had beaten when she heard his footsteps,
how she had thrilled when he had said "dear" to her. She remembered the
care he had taken of her, the beautiful considerate devotion he had
always shown her when she was longing so passionately for other things,
trying with all her might and main to make him lose his head. _How_
badly she had behaved. She could wonder now dispassionately whether he
had _ever_ been in love with her. On the whole, she thought, he never
had. If she had not been married--it was a silly "if." The most he had
said was "you make things very difficult," not a very satisfactory
avowal when you came to think it over calmly. But she remembered how it
had thrilled her at the time--what a blank cheque of possibilities it
had seemed. She remembered, too, the evening when he had talked
seriously to her--very gently, very tenderly, very gravely. She had
thought he was going to say, "I don't want to be made unhappy," and,
instead, he had said, "I don't want you to be unhappy." That had been a
nasty one. How she had lashed him with her tongue! What inexhaustible
reserves of icy acid she had brought forward.

She had tried to hurt him as much as ever she could. How hurt had he
been? She wondered. It was all