to put some sort of
social unity into the lives of the mill-hands; and when, on the day
after his return from New York, she presented herself, as usual, at the
Westmore office, where she was in the habit of holding a brief
consultation with him before starting on her rounds, she was at once
aware of a new tinge of constraint in his manner. It hurt him, then, to
see her at Westmore--hurt him more than to live with her, at Hanaford,
under Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real life
was led, the life with which Justine had been most identified, the life
that had been made possible for both by the magnanimity of that other
woman whose presence was now forever between them.

Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as though unconscious of any
change; but whereas in the past they had always found pretexts for
seeking each other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, or
merely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two, now each went a
separate way, sometimes not meeting till they regained the house at
night-fall.

And as the weeks passed she began to understand that, by a strange
inversion of probability, the relation between Amherst and herself was
to be the means of holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope--if
indeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had made such a
compact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their life
together as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact
was being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjecting
him to intolerable suffering--was coming to be the personification of
the very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape.
Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and in
Westmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even the
memory of what he was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept the
thought alive; and, had every other incentive lost its power, this would
have been enough to sustain her. Fate had, ironically enough, furnished
her with an unanswerable reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibility
of their keeping up such a relation as now existed between them would
soon become too patent to be denied.

Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that external conditions would
also call upon her to act. The visible signal for her withdrawal would
be Cicely's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in early
June; and Amherst, some month