ges, formal,
intensely sensitive to ridicule, incapable of humour.

This was Quarrier as she knew him or had known him. Recently she had,
little by little, become aware of an indefinable change in the man. For
one thing, he had grown more reticent. At times, too, his reserve seemed
to have something almost surly about it; under his cold composure a hint
of something concealed, watchful, and very quiet.

Confidences she had never looked for in him nor desired. It appalled her
at moments to realise how little they had in common, and that only
on the surface--a communion of superficial interest incident to the
fulfilment of social duties and the pursuit of pleasure. Beyond that she
knew nothing of him, required nothing of him. What was there to know?
what to require?

Now that the main line of her route through life had been surveyed and
carefully laid out, what was there more for her in life than to set
out upon her progress? It was her own road. Presumptive leader already,
logical leader from the day she married--leader, in fact, when the
ukase, her future legacy, so decreed; it was a royal road laid out for
her through the gardens and pleasant places; a road for her alone, and
over it she had chosen to pass. What more was there to desire?

From the going of Siward, all that he had aroused in her of love, of
intelligence, of wholesome desire and sane curiosity--the intellectual
restlessness, the capacity for passion, the renaissance of the simpler
innocence--had subsided into the laissez faire of dull quiescence. If
in her he had sown, imprudently, subtle, impulsive, unworldly
ideas, flowering into sudden brilliancy in the quick magic of his
companionship, now those flowers were dead under the inexorable winter
of her ambition, where all such things lay; her lonely childhood, with
its dimmed visions of mother-love ineffable; the strange splendour of
the dreams haunting her adolescence--pageants of bravery and the
glitter of the cross, altars of self-denial and pure intent, service
and sacrifice and the scorn of wrong; and sometimes, seen dimly with
enraptured eyes through dissolving mists--the man! glimmering for an
instant, then fading, resolved into the starry void which fashioned him.

Riding there, head bent, her pulses timing the slow pacing of her
horse, she presently became aware, without looking up, that Quarrier was
watching her. Dreams vanished. A perfectly unreasonable sense of being
spied upon, of some