tter had done much towards rounding the
sharpened contours of her face, and to all outward appearance she was
the same Nan who had stayed at Mallow almost a year ago.

But within herself she knew that a great gulf lay fixed between those
insouciant, long-ago days and this golden, scented morning. The world
had not altered. June was still vivid and sweet with the rapture of
summer. It was she herself who had changed.

Looking backward, she almost wondered how she had endured the agony of
love and suffering and sacrifice which had been compressed into a
single year. She wished sometimes that they had let her die when she
was so ill--let her slip easily out of the world while the delirium of
fever still closed the door on conscious knowledge of all that she had
lost. It seemed foolish to make so much effort to hold on to life when
everything which had made it lovely and pleasant and desirable had gone
out of it. Yet there were still moments, as to-day, when the sheer
beauty of the earth so thrilled her that for the time being life was a
thousand times worth living.

And behind it all--back of the tears and suffering which seemed so
cruelly incomprehensible--there lay always the inscrutable and splendid
purposes of God, and the Ultimate Light beyond. Lord St. John had
taught her that. It had been his own courageous, unshakable belief.
But now he had gone from her she found her faith faltering. It was too
difficult--well-nigh impossible--to hold fast to the big uplift of such
thought and faith as had been his.

Her marriage loomed ahead in the near future, and in spite of her
dogged intention to fulfil her bargain, she dreaded unspeakably the
actual day which would make her Roger's wife--compelling her to a
physical and spiritual bondage from which she shrank with loathing.

But there could be no escape. None. Throughout her illness, and since
then, while she had groped her way slowly back to health here at
Mallow, Roger had been thoughtful and considerate to an astonishing
degree. Never once, during all the hours they had passed together, had
he let that strong passion of his break loose, though once or twice she
thought she had heard it leap against the bars which prisoned it--the
hot, imperious desire to which one day she must submit unmurmuringly.

Drilled by Kitty, he had been very undemanding up till now. Often he
had left her with only a kindly pressure of the hand or a light kiss on
her forehead, a