ve in Paris and study with
Madame Savelli should be considered as a debt, which she would repay out
of her first earnings. But Owen had laughed at her. He had refused to
accept it, and he would never tell her the rent of the house in the Rue
Balzac; he had urged that as he had made use of the house he could not
allow her to pay for it. In the rough, she supposed that a thousand
pounds would settle her debt for the year they had spent in Paris.

Since then she had, however, insisted on keeping herself, but now that
she came to think it out, it did not seem that she had done much more
than pay her dressmaker's bills. She grew alarmed at the amount of her
debt, which seemed in her excited imagination so large that all her
savings, amounting to about six or seven thousand pounds, would not
suffice to pay it off. Most of her jewellery had been given to her by
Owen; there was the furniture, the pictures and the china in Park Lane!
She would have to return all these, and the horses, too, if she wished
to pay everything, and the net result would be that she would mortally
offend the man who had done everything for her. She knew he would not
forgive her if she sent back the presents he had made her, nor could she
blame him, and she decided that such complete restitution was
impossible. But, for all she knew, Monsignor might insist upon it. If he
did? She felt that she would go mad if she did not put aside these
scruples, which she knew to be in a measure fictitious, but which she
was nevertheless unable to shake off. And she could not help thinking,
though she knew that such thoughts were both foolish and unjust, that
Owen had purposely contrived this thraldom. Then there was only one
thing for her to do, to go to Paris after Ulick.... A moment after there
came a sinking feeling. She knew that she could not. But what was she to
do? All this uncertainty was loosening her brain.... She might go to
Monsignor and lay the whole matter before him and take his advice. But
she knew if she went to him she must confess. Better that, she thought,
than that the intolerable present should endure.

Mental depression and sleepless nights had produced nervous pains in her
neck and arms. She could hardly drag herself along for very weariness.
The very substance of her being seemed to waste away; that amount of
unconsciousness without which life is an agony had been abstracted,
leaving nothing but a fierce mentality.

She slept a little after d