at it made a perfect square, crisp, thick,
impervious even to life. This done, I glanced up quickly, armed with a
shield of my own. She pierced through my shield; she gazed into my eyes
as if searching any sediment of courage at the depths of them and
damping it to clay. Her twitch alone denied all hope, discounted all
illusion.

So we rattled through Surrey and across the border into Sussex. But with
my eyes upon life I did not see that the other travellers had left, one
by one, till, save for the man who read, we were alone together. Here
was Three Bridges station. We drew slowly down the platform and
stopped. Was he going to leave us? I prayed both ways--I prayed last
that he might stay. At that instant he roused himself, crumpled his
paper contemptuously, like a thing done with, burst open the door, and
left us alone.

The unhappy woman, leaning a little forward, palely and colourlessly
addressed me--talked of stations and holidays, of brothers at
Eastbourne, and the time of year, which was, I forget now, early or
late. But at last looking from the window and seeing, I knew, only life,
she breathed, "Staying away--that's the drawback of it----" Ah, now we
approached the catastrophe, "My sister-in-law"--the bitterness of her
tone was like lemon on cold steel, and speaking, not to me, but to
herself, she muttered, "nonsense, she would say--that's what they all
say," and while she spoke she fidgeted as though the skin on her back
were as a plucked fowl's in a poulterer's shop-window.

"Oh, that cow!" she broke off nervously, as though the great wooden cow
in the meadow had shocked her and saved her from some indiscretion. Then
she shuddered, and then she made the awkward angular movement that I had
seen before, as if, after the spasm, some spot between the shoulders
burnt or itched. Then again she looked the most unhappy woman in the
world, and I once more reproached her, though not with the same
conviction, for if there were a reason, and if I knew the reason, the
stigma was removed from life.

"Sisters-in-law," I said--

Her lips pursed as if to spit venom at the word; pursed they remained.
All she did was to take her glove and rub hard at a spot on the
window-pane. She rubbed as if she would rub something out for ever--some
stain, some indelible contamination. Indeed, the spot remained for all
her rubbing, and back she sank with the shudder and the clutch of the
arm I had come to expect. Something impelled me