as suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an
overcoat.

She had not heard it. She read Gertrude's letter again to make sure.
Among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that Gertrude
had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. She had broken her pledge.

They kept things from her, then. Heaven only knew what they had kept.

She read Henry's letter again. There were no details, but her mind
supplied them as it grasped the sense of what he _had_ written. There
rose before her instantly a vision of Hugh lying in his bed ill. He had
a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. He was in for gastritis, at the
least, if it was not pneumonia. She saw with intolerable vividness a
long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill,
down to their remotest consequences. Her imagination never missed one.

And instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the
splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and
her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. It
was as if it owned that it was beaten. She had no more fear of it. And
she had no more fear of George Tanqueray.

Nothing existed for her but the fear that hung round Brodrick in his
bed. This vision of calamity was unspeakable, it was worse than all the
calamities that had actually been. It was worse through its significance
and premonition than the illness of her little son; it was worse than
the loss of her little dead-born daughter; it brought back to her with a
more unendurable pang that everlasting warning utterance of Nina's,
"With you--there'll be no end to your paying." Her heart cried out to
powers discerned as implacable, "Anything but that! Anything but that!"

She had missed the first possible train to Waterloo, but there was
another from a station five miles distant which would bring her home
early in the evening. She packed hurriedly and sent one of the farm
people to the village for a fly. Then she paced the room, maddening over
the hours that she had still to spare.

Once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Hugh was not
so very ill. If he had been Henry would have told her. He would have
suggested the propriety of her return. And Henry's brief reference to
Dartmoor had suggested continuance rather than return.

But her fear remained with her. It made her forget all about George
Tanqueray.

It was the sudden striking of ten o'clock that r