Anguish? Yes!--but not of such torturing quality as she could have felt
a year, six months even, before this date. She was astonished that she
could bear her life, that he could sit there in the night stillness,
motionless, holding her breath even, while Roger slept there in the
shadowed bed. Had this thing happened to her before their arrival at
Heston, she must have fallen upon Roger in mad grief and passion, ready
to kill him or herself; must at least have poured out torrents of
useless words and tears. She could not have sat dumb like this; in
misery, but quite able to think things out, to envisage all the dark
possibilities of the future. And not only the future. By a perfectly
logical diversion her thoughts presently went racing to the past. There
was, so to speak, a suspension of the immediate crisis, while she
listened to her own mind--while she watched her own years go by.

It was but rarely that Daphne let her mind run on her own origins. But
on this winter night, as she sat motionless by the fire, she became
conscious of a sudden detachment from her most recent self and life--a
sudden violent turning against both--which naturally threw her back on
the past, on some reflection upon what she had made of herself, by way
of guide to what she might still make of herself, if she struck boldly,
now, while there was yet time, for her own freedom and development.

As to her parents, she never confessed, even to herself, that she owed
them anything, except, of course, the mere crude wealth that her father
had left her. Otherwise she was vaguely ashamed of them both. And
yet!--in her most vital qualities, her love of sensational effect, her
scorn of half-measures, her quick, relentless imagination, her
increasing ostentation and extravagance, she was the true child of the
boastful mercurial Irishman who had married her Spanish mother as part
of a trade bargain, on a chance visit to Buenos Ayres. For twenty years
Daniel Floyd had leased and exploited, had ravaged and destroyed, great
tracts of primaeval forest in the northern regions of his adopted state,
leaving behind him a ruined earth and an impoverished community, but
building up the while a colossal fortune. He had learnt the arts of
municipal "bossing" in one of the minor towns of Illinois, and had then
migrated to Chicago, where for years he was the life and soul of all the
bolder and more adventurous corruption of the city. A jovial, handsome
fellow!--with a