athed but Hambleby. His presence destroyed those poignant, almost
tangible memories of Tanqueray, those fragments of Tanqueray that
adhered to the things that he had looked upon and touched. She was no
longer afraid of these things or of the house that contained them. She
no longer felt any terror of her solitude, any premonition of trouble as
she entered the place. Away from it she found herself longing for its
stillness, for the very sight of the walls that folded her in this
incomparable peace.

She had never known what peace was until now. If she had she would have
been aware that her state was too exquisite to last. She had not allowed
for the flight of the days and for the inevitable return of people, of
the dreadful, clever little people. By November they had all come back.
They had found her behind her barricades. They approached, some
tentatively, some insistently, some with an ingenuity no foresight could
defeat. One by one they came. First Caro Bickersteth, and Caro once let
in, it was impossible to keep out the rest. For Caro believed in knowing
the right people, and in the right people knowing each other. It was
Caro, last year, who had opened the innumerable doors by which they had
streamed in, converging upon Jane. And they were more terrible than they
had been last year, braced as they were by their sense of communion, of
an intimacy so established that it ignored reluctance and refusal. They
had given introductions to each other, and behind them, on the horrific
verge, Jane saw the heaving, hovering multitudes of the as yet
unintroduced.

By December she realized again that she was celebrated; by January that
she was hunted down, surrounded, captured, and alone.

For last year, when it all began, she had had George Tanqueray.
Tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. His
greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their
littleness. He had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity,
so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was.

And now, six months after George's marriage, it was borne in upon her
with appalling certitude that George was necessary to her, and that he
was not there.

He had not even written to her since he married.

Then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony,
he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy.
Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the d