nqueray's ever having been. The place was incontestably
and inalterably Nina's. There were things in it cared for by Nina with a
superstitious tenderness, portraits, miniatures, relics guarded, as it
were, in shrines. And in their company were things that Nina had worn
out and done with; things overturned, crushed, flung from her in a fury
of rejection; things on which Nina had inflicted personal violence,
provoked, you felt, by their too long and intimate association with her;
signs everywhere of the pace at which she went through things. It was as
if Nina had torn off shreds, fringes, whole layers of herself and left
them there. You inferred behind her a long, half-savage ancestry of the
open air. There were antlers about and the skins of animals. A
hunting-crop hung by the chimney-piece. Foils, fishing-rods, golf-clubs
staggered together in a corner. Nina herself, long-limbed, tawny,
aquiline, had the look of wild and nervous adolescence prisoned within
walls.

Beyond this confusion and disorder, her windows opened wide to London,
to the constellated fires, the grey enchantment and silence of the
river.

It was Nina who began it. Leaning back in a very low chair, with her
legs crossed and her arms flung wide, a position almost insolent in its
ease, she talked.

"Jinny," she said, "have you any idea how it happened?"

Jane made a sound of negation that was almost inaudible, and wholly
inarticulate.

Nina pondered. "I believe," she said presently, "you _do_ know." She
paused on that a moment. "It needn't have happened," she said. "It
wouldn't if you'd shown him that you cared."

Jane looked at her then. "I did show him," she said. "That's how it
happened."

"It couldn't. Not that way."

"It did. I waked him up. I made him restless, I made him want things.
But there was nothing--nothing----"

"You forget. I've seen him with you. What's more, I've seen him without
you."

"Ah, but it wasn't _that_. Not for a moment. It could never have been
_that_."

"You could have made it that. You could have made it anything you liked.
Jinny! If I'd been as sure of him as you were, I'd never have let him
go. I'd have held on----"

Her hands' tense clutch on the arm of her chair showed how she would
have held on.

"You see," said Jinny, "I was never sure of him."

A silence fell between them.

"You were in it," said Nina, troubling the silence. "It must--it must
have been something you did to him."

"Or something