of ascending Primrose Hill, threatening indeed to strangle her if
she persisted in it, that Miss Quincey unwillingly gave in and contented
herself with a seat in one of the lower walks of the park. There she
leaned back and looked about her, but with no permanent interest in one
thing more than another.

Presently, as she settled down to quieter breathing, there came to her a
strange sensation, that grew till it became an unusually vivid perception
of the outer world; a perception mingled with a still stranger double
vision, a sense that seemed to be born in the dark of the brain and to
be moving there to a foregone conclusion. And all the time her eyes
were busy, now with a bush of May in crimson blossom, now with the
many-pointed leaves of a sycamore pricked against the blue; now with the
straight rectangular paths that made the park an immense mathematical
diagram. From where she sat her eyes swept the length of the wide walk
that cuts the green from east to west. Far down at the west end was a
seat, and she could see two people, a man and a woman, sitting on it;
they must have been there a quarter of an hour or more; she had noticed
them ever since she came into the park.

They had risen, and her gaze left everything else to follow them; or
rather, it went to meet them, for they had turned and were coming slowly
eastward now. They had stopped; they were facing each other, and her gaze
rested with them, fascinated yet uncertain. And now she could see nothing
else; the park, with the regions beyond it and the sky above it, had
become merely a setting for one man and one woman; the avenue, fresh
strewn with red golden gravel, led up to them and ended there at their
feet; a young poplar trembled in the wind and shook its silver green fans
above them in delicate confusion. The next minute a light went up in that
obscure and prophetic background of her brain; and she saw Rhoda Vivian
and Bastian Cautley coming towards her, greeting her, with their kind
faces shining.

She rose, turned from them, and went slowly home.

It was the last rent in the veil of illusion that Rhoda had spun so well.
Up till then Miss Quincey had seen only half the truth. Now she had seen
the whole, with all that Rhoda had disguised and kept hidden from her;
the truth that kills or cures.

Miss Quincey did not go out again that day, but sat all afternoon silent
in her chair. Towards evening she became talkative and stayed up later
than had be