dulled the passion of her misery, her rage, her shuddering
horror at herself. But alone in the train, it all returned upon her,
only with a complete realization of circumstance which made it worse.

It had been her impulse to rush to her home, to her husband, as for
refuge. Now she perceived that there was no refuge for her, no comfort
in her despair, but rather another ordeal to be faced. She would have to
tell her husband the truth, so far as she knew it. Good God! Why could
she not shake off from her soul the degradation, the burning shame of
this fair flesh of hers, and return to him with some other body, however
homely, which should be hers and hers alone? She remembered that the man
she loathed had said that Ian would not be back in England until
to-morrow. She supposed the Evil Thing had counted on stealing home in
time to meet him, and would have met him with an innocently smiling
face.

A moment Milly triumphed in the thought that it was she herself who
would meet Ian and reveal to him the treachery of the creature who had
supplanted her in his heart. Then with a shudder she hid her face,
remembering that it was, after all, her own dishonor and his which she
must reveal. He would of course take her back, and if that could be the
end, they might live down the thing together. But it would not be the
end. "I am the stronger," that Evil Thing had said, and it was the
stronger. At first step by step, now with swift advancing strides, it
was robbing her of the months, the years, till soon, very soon, while in
the world's eyes she seemed to live and thrive, she would be dead; dead,
without a monument, without a tear, her very soul not free and in God's
hands, but held somewhere in abeyance. And Ian? Through what
degradation, to what public shame would he, the most refined and
sensitive of men, be dragged! His child--her child and Ian's--would grow
up like that poor wretched George Goring, breathing corruption, lies,
dishonor, from his earliest years. And she, the wife, the mother, would
seem to be guilty of all that, while she was really bound,
helpless--dead.

The passion of her anger and despair stormed through her veins again
with yet greater violence, but this time George Goring was forgotten and
all its waves broke impotently against that adversary whose diabolical
power she was so impotent to resist, who might return to-morrow, to-day
for aught she knew.

She had been moving restlessly about the compartment