the waterfall. I hate it," he added almost
fiercely. "It was there that I first heard--but I have told you."

He relapsed into silence and sent away the food on his plate untasted.
Lily glanced across at him. But she said nothing more. And Maurice was
struck by the consciousness that she took his strangeness strangely,
with a lack of curiosity, a lack of protestation unlike a woman; almost
for the first time since they were married he was moved to wonder how
much she loved him, indeed whether she still loved him at all. He had
got up from the dinner table and stood with one hand leaning upon it as
he looked steadily, with his heavy and hunted eyes, across at Lily.

"Are you glad to go with the Canon?" he asked.

"I am quite ready to go," she said quietly.

"You don't mind leaving me?"

"I think you wish me to leave you--"

"Perhaps I do," he said, watching her to see if she winced at the words.

But her face was still and calm.

"What then?"

"Then it is better for me to go for a little while than to stay."

"For a little while," he repeated, "yes."

He turned and went slowly out of the room, and suddenly his face was
distorted. For, in the darkness of the hall, he heard the child crying
and lamenting. He stopped and listened to it like a man who resolutely
faces his destruction. And, as so many times, he asked himself; "Is this
a freak of my imagination, a trick of my nerves?" No, the sound was
surely real, was close to him. It thrilled in his ears keenly. He could
not doubt its reality. Yet he acknowledged to himself that he could not
actually locate it. Only in that respect did it differ from other sounds
of earth. As he stood in the half darkness, listening, a horror, greater
than he had ever felt before, came over him. The cry seemed to him
menacing, no longer merely a cry for sympathy, for assistance, no longer
merely the cry of a helpless creature in pain. He turned white and
sick, and clapped his two hands to his ears. And just as he did so the
dining-room door opened and Lily came out, a thin stream of light
following her and falling upon Maurice. He started at the vision of her
and at the revealing illumination. His nerves were quivering. His whole
body seemed to vibrate.

"Don't come near me," he cried out to Lily. "It is worse since you are
with me. Your presence makes my danger. Ah!"

And with a cry he dashed into his study, banging the door behind him, as
if he fled from her.

*