CHAPTER XIII

Felicia stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey, unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land that melted to the sky, was a bleak, diffused whiteness that told where the sun was. Since her arrival the day before the rain had poured down ceaselessly, imprisoning her in the lonely house. Her father, after the scene of her hateful avowal, her escape from his fury of sympathy, had gone to Paris for a week. She had left him packing in the flat; he would join her later.

Felicia had taken one of the maids with her in her flight from the desecrated new to the old home, and had wearily aided her in making it liveable. The sitting-room where she now stood, after her half-tasted lunch of tea and fruit and bread-and-butter, was cheerless, for the more intimate books and pictures were in London; the furniture without its chintz covers was shabby, and the fire after long smoking, only now forced its way to a sullen brightness through heaped-up logs. She turned to glance at it once or twice, mechanically conscious of housekeeping duties. It had quite done smoking; it was going to burn. Presently, before the blaze, she would sit and rest--and sleep; there had been no sleep last night in her desolate room between the blankets of a hurriedly improvised bed; the maid protesting against damp sheets. Felicia had wondered indifferently, as they worked together, what the kind girl thought of this ominous pic-nic impromptu; she thanked her inwardly for the dumb discretion of her class. There was nothing more to do now. Chintz-covers--she glanced at the chairs that looked flayed without their proper coverings; but those had better wait until just before her father's arrival; for him she must manage cheeriness as well as the bare comforts of life. Until he came all she wanted was stillness, warmth, a bed to creep into at night.

Felicia's mind was fixed on two points, one past, one future--the writing of a letter yesterday to Maurice and his finding of it when he returned to-night--or to-morrow morning. She saw herself in the pause between a dagger's uplifting and its stabbing fall. She had known no pity in writing; she felt no pity for the reading. Her mind, indeed, went with a sullen quiet--much like the flames among their logs--through the well-remembered words.

"I am leaving you to-day and I will never see you again. Lady Angela has showed me the letter you wrote to her before we were married. You did not even marry me through generous pity; Geoffrey forced you to it. You betrayed him to her; you betrayed me to her. You gave me your sham in return for my reality. Do not tell me that you loved me then, and now. That is the worst of it. Such love is a sham. I despise you. I see only falseness and cowardice in you. And through all this ruin I see Geoffrey as he is--and I see myself. I see now that I love him. You know that your honour--a strange word to write to you--is safe between our hands; but I love him as much as I hate you; the thought that he is there helps me to live. It is through your baseness that I see all his nobility. Do not write to me, for I shall not answer. These are the last words that you shall ever see from me."

This letter was lying on Maurice's dressing-table waiting for him.

There had been a fierce exultation in writing it, as at escape from a stifling cavern; and the sense of having flung the soiled and tattered past behind her, wrenched manacles of pity and tenderness from her bleeding flesh, of having run, naked, free, into the night--the cold, calm night, upheld her. But at moments those written words whirled oddly in her mind. "To him? From me?" She would think it dizzily; and dread clutched at her heart, dread of she knew not what, except the fate that had made the writing inevitable. A Felicia cruel enough to write it was as strange as a Maurice base enough to make her cruel.

But, she told herself, leaning her forehead against the cold window pane, to think herself cruel was still to idealize Maurice. He would suffer--for a day, a week, a year perhaps; would, fancying that he had truly loved her, feel remorse, despair; but when her love was no longer there to call forth his response the fancy would soon die. His love for her was no doubt as real as anything in him was real; but no love in Maurice could be more than fancy. His buoyancy would float him once more, and life once more be sweet to him. Life would always, in spite of certain moments of black whirlpool, be sweet for Maurice.

She could even imagine a sentimental bond growing between him and Angela. Angela was horrible enough for any cleverness. Her passion had a sincerity that would give life to any lie. She would twist facts into some becoming shape, build her bower and beckon Maurice into it. A shuddering seized her thoughts of Angela; she turned from them.

The rain now dashed on the window. The pallid memory of light was gone from the sky. Fold upon fold of deeper darkness covered it. The trees shook in the rising gusts of wind.

There was the turn of the road that she had often watched through so many years, longing for it to bring life to her. Well, she had had her wish. She had met her lions. She could not feel herself ennobled by her contests. It rather seemed that the lions had mangled her.

As she stood, pressing her forehead against the window and looking at the storm, she saw a figure, leaning to the steep ascent far down the road, a tall man's figure under an umbrella.

Figures were few on the road, and, on such a day, a casual stroller improbable. Her heart leaped to a terror of Maurice coming in person to plead and expostulate. Impossible that her letter had not forbidden all pleading and expostulation. It could not be Maurice.

It was not, as she saw, with a drooping of the breath in a relief so great that she knew how great the foolish terror must have been, as the figure, after a momentary disappearance, came nearer in that turn of the road. The long waterproof, the slanted umbrella, still made identity a conjecture; but already the steady stride, the grave, decisive carriage had a familiarity that hurried a new and deeper fear on the first. Not Maurice; not her father; obviously not Uncle Cuthbert. Could it be Geoffrey?

Since the day before, Geoffrey had been for her a figure aureoled and pedestalled--strange transfiguration of the statesman statue!--lifted high, far away, in his almost saintly strength; a figure to be gazed at with thanksgiving for its smile upon herself; but still so strange in its new setting that any nearness of regret or tremor had not touched her.

But to see Geoffrey now--now that she was his--and knew it.--The thought shook her with regret, fear, unutterable sadness.

It was Geoffrey. She drew back from the window as he approached the house. Regret was for the past, sadness for the future, but the fear was for the present and it seized her like the storm. He was perhaps not so high, so aureoled, so saintly. Wild surmises flashed lightnings through her mind, that seemed to rock like an empty bird's nest in a shaken tree. Had Maurice returned? Had he in a frenzy of anger or despair showed Geoffrey her letter? Had Geoffrey come to claim her on the strength of her own avowal?--come to claim her?--to take her away?

She had no time to analyze the terror of such surmises--what they implied of disillusion in him--or to look at the rapture that ran a dreadful radiance through terror and disillusion. That there should be rapture was perhaps the terror's root. She heard him in the hall ridding himself of the dripping umbrella and waterproof. Why, after all, call it disillusion? Perhaps strength not less saintly than that of renunciation lay in a solemn claiming. His nobility had chained them. Might not nobility now break the chains? But could he break them? Was not her strength to be counted with? She was asking herself the final question--in a gasp--as he came in.

His white, intent face admitted of many interpretations, even of one altogether new to her, for she felt in it something of a hesitation, a perplexity, that suggested weakness. For once he was not sure of himself; or, rather, not sure of what he was to do. Felicia, near the window, looked silently at him.

"It's true, then, you have left him?"

His eyes sounded hers as though he, too, were finding new meanings in her.

"Yes, I have left him. Who told you?"

"Your father. He was just leaving the flat. He was very incoherent. All I could grasp was that."

He did not know then, and any revelation of what his attitude would be when he did know was adjourned. Felicia, feeling suddenly how faint she was, how weak from want of food and sleep, went past him and sank into the deep old chair before the fire.

"Sit down. You must be tired. You had to walk from the station? There was no fly?"

"No. I didn't mind the walk." Geoffrey did not sit down; he took a turn or two up and down the room.

"Your father said that you would never go back to your husband."

"I never will."

"You have ceased to love him, then?"

"Absolutely ceased."

Geoffrey had paused now near the window, and was looking out. She could guess of what he was thinking; of that walk in the spring woods, and the girl who had said that to be unhappy with the man she loved would be happiness. He was thinking that he had tried to give her happiness and that he had failed. And presently, without turning, he said, "May I ask why?"

The thought of the spring day dwelt with her, infusing all the present tragedy with a tender, an exquisite pathos--like the spring's--like the day of distant bird-songs and melancholy brooks. She owed him everything. _Might_ he ask?

"What may you not ask?" she said. "There is nothing that I have a right to keep from you now. This is why. Lady Angela showed me this--yesterday." Without turning her head she held out the letter. "It was written, you will see, the day after you and I walked together--when you told me that you loved me--when I told you that I loved him."

Geoffrey's hand was on the letter. For a moment, as her memory chimed with his, he grasped her wrist and she felt his kiss upon her hand.

He did not know. In the silence that followed, while, behind her chair, he read, Felicia was wondering, wondering--would he discover it? Should she hide it? Should she tell him? Was it not indeed his right to be told? Did she not owe it to him to let him know that a reward--though such a tragically belated one--had at last come to him? Even to hesitate seemed to smirch him with that fear of disillusion; or, her mind followed it further, hunted it down, while she breathed quickly--was it the possible rapture that made the real dread--the rapture of seeing him claim her and of admitting his claim? With an almost lassitude she thrust the balancing thoughts from her. How could she know what she felt or what she was, until the truth was there spoken and looked at between them? The circle had brought her back again to the first question. Should she tell him? She could not answer it. She closed her eyes. Suddenly she thought sharply, "I must not tell." She wondered if it was an inspiration; it seemed to have no sequence. So oddly does the most logical thing in life, the rewarding illumination of a conscience and character strengthened by strife, dazzle the obviously linked, the bewildered and bewildering intelligence. Like the revolving light of an unseen lighthouse it flashed out. A moment after it seemed unreal. Yet the memory of it would almost automatically guide a way among reefs and breakers and siren whirlpools. Felicia did not think all this. She kept her eyes closed and breathed more quietly. Geoffrey stood silent, and she knew, without looking round, that he had finished the letter.

"Now you see. Now you understand all," she said.

He made no answer. She opened her eyes, turned in her chair. He had mastered any horror, though his expression had the strained look of having been wrenched from horror to the resolute facing of a mystery to be tracked. He seemed to gaze through her at it.

"Now you see. Now you understand," she repeated. "I do, Geoffrey."

She had never called him by his name before.

His eyes now rested on hers.

"Let me tell you," she said, still leaning her head and shoulder against the side of the deep chair while she looked at him, unshaken now and calm. "Let me tell you that I see you and know you--and understand. Don't ever think that it has been wasted, or regret it, or feel that it has made sorrow where you meant it to make happiness. At first I could see nothing but my rage, my humiliation: but that has drifted away. I hardly feel anything now except my gratitude to you for your wonderful nobility--your love. To see it--to know it--is worth the suffering."

He could feel the tempests over which the calm had been won, and the calm moved him more than sobs or outcries. He looked from her head--the dear, proud head--to the letter that had laid it in the dust, and the conquered horror for a moment quivered across his face.

"How could he. To you." It was not question or exclamation, but a deep, sickened wonder.

"He had to. He did not love her enough to face your scorn--and my pain; he didn't love me enough to face hers. Fear is the very root of him." She paused, a question like a whip-lash cutting her. "You thought he loved me? You would not have given me to mere pity?"

"I?" Geoffrey's stare was almost boyish.

"I?--who loved you enough to give you to the happiness you cried for?" it said.

"Forgive me for the mere thought. I have been such a chattel--a thing to be tossed appeasingly to a rival." Again she closed her eyes. "It makes me dizzy sometimes."

Geoffrey wandered off again to the window. He could not contemplate her pain, and for a long time there was silence in the room while he gazed, as Felicia had gazed, over the desolate country. The rain swept around the hill-top like a mantle; all but the nearest trees were blotted out.

Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice, holding his thoughts steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice--how near his heart he only now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back, lamenting--seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man, so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet--was it essential? Still holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice's baseness would serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He grasped at last his own decision.

He did not turn from the window as he said, "You must go back to him."

Her long silence showed, perhaps, a speechless horror. He turned to her. She still lay back in the chair. He came before her. She raised empty eyes to him.

"I know that he loved you; you know, as I do, how he loves you now, how incapable, now, he would be of it." She made no reply. There was no reproach in her eyes, no pain or rebellion, only a strange, still depth where he could see nothing. His decision reinforced itself as it felt a quiver of blind presage run through it.

"He was a base coward. I feel it for you as deeply--more deeply than you can for yourself. He was in despair of marrying you and he dallied with Angela--well, if he were half in love, what matter now? He had been in love half a dozen times before he met you. All those young emotions are games; Maurice was playing at life. He needed reality, and he has lived into it with you. I saw him cry with despair when he thought he had lost you; I saw his rapture when I told him he could marry you. I can guess what happened afterwards. He was afraid of Angela--and sorry for her, and he wrote her this lie. Yes, he was a liar and a coward--what of it? You have made him over. He is a different man. Say that he still is weak as water--what of it? He adores you; I know it--and you loved him--once. You gain nothing by leaving him, and he loses everything--everything. _You_ are his only chance. He will go to pieces without you."

Her silence, those deep, empty eyes on his, almost exasperated him with the sense of fighting in the dark--he knew not what--but fighting some force in her, strong in its still resistance. And not in her only; in himself he felt a rising host of shadowy, veiled opponents.

He walked away from her up and down the room. "Only the other night--how I understand it now--he was trying to tell me all he could. He spoke of remorse and of his love for you, Felicia; he said that he would die without you."

"Do you really want me to go?" Felicia asked.

Geoffrey, glancing at her, saw that she had covered her face with her hands. He stopped in his impatient walking, his back to her. "I want what is best for him, and for you. You know I'm not a sentimentalist. I think a woman better off, more secure, more sure of a rightly developing life even with a husband she thinks she can't care for, than drifting about by herself; a dubious rebel against conventionality; forced into an exaggerated dignity, an exaggerated uprightness; conscious that she has to be explained and justified; cut off from her social and domestic roots--a flower if you will, and a very sweet and spotless flower,--but a flower kept alive in a vase of water, under cover, in an artificial temperature, liable to shatterings--to witherings; not a flower well rooted in the earth, growing, with the wind and sun about it."

"Witherings? Shatterings? What if the very ground one grew in is poisoned? You want me to go back to him--not loving him; do you want me to go back hating?--for I do hate him."

Geoffrey still paused.

"I want you to go back understanding him; pitying him. Bother love."

That memory of the lighthouse flash could no longer guide in this darkness where a blind and wilful giant's hand steered for a shore of reefs and precipitous cliffs intolerable for shuddering flesh to look upon. She herself must grasp the helm and turn the ship straight to the open, unknown sea.

"Do you want me to go back, loving you?" she said.

"Loving me?" Geoffrey repeated, and the giant indeed reeled back, as if from a staggering blow. His arm fallen, the ship in a moment had whirled round and fronted the tempestuous elements.

Her final question had been asked as evenly, as monotonously as the others. She went on: "I wrote and told him that I despised him--hated him, that I would never go back to him. And I told him that I loved you. He will get that letter to-morrow--perhaps to-day."

Geoffrey turned to her. All thought was struck to chaos. Maurice, Felicia, himself went like storm-blown birds through the mind that had been too steady--in the steadiness a rigidity tempting to an ironic, shattering blow. And in the chaos Maurice sank back--back, and down--where he had chosen to be, by his own act; and Felicia rose like dawn over the darkness. He approached her, leaned over her.

She opened her eyes to him.

The beat of the rain against the windows sounded as if from great distances. They were near in grey solitude, the world fading to emptiness; they were near in the enfolding storm, in the sound that was like a deeper silence. Neither spoke and neither smiled; into the mind of neither man nor woman came the image of a kiss or an embrace. Looking deeply into each other's eyes they seemed to see an eternity of awe and wonder. It was Geoffrey who first spoke.

"I felt it."

"You did not know it, Geoffrey."

"I touched something in the dark."

"I would not have told you if you had not wished to send me back to him."

"Why not, Felicia?"

Her eyelids for a moment fell, almost as if she mused.

"It seemed to make things less simple--more difficult."

"More difficult, perhaps," said Geoffrey, "but more simple, too, I think. Have you known for long?"

"Only, clearly, yesterday; but it seems now as if it had been there--oh--for long, long--since the beginning perhaps. I can't tell. I can't see. But so strangely, Geoffrey, not touching or harming my love for him, giving it strength indeed, I believe, as you gave me strength."

Still she seemed to muse, quietly; with down-cast eyes in speaking, but, in her pauses, raising that grave eternity of look to him.

"The threads go back and back--and they turn round one another. I can't see them separately till now--when his is broken. You remember when you kissed me, Geoffrey, at the edge of the wood? It was then--it must have been then--that the threads ran together. And ever since you have been woven into my life--into my love for my husband--I don't know what was you and what was I."

His hand on the back of the chair, he still leaned over her. Felicia rose, drawing a long breath. She walked to the end of the room; went to the window; turned to face him.

"Ah! Felicia," said Geoffrey. Looking at her with a sadness almost stern, he clasped his hands together in a gesture curiously uncharacteristic of him; significant of his helpless pain.

"Yes, yes," she said, "I know. Why did I make the mistake? Why did I not see who was the man I must love? Geoffrey, I would rather have you reproach me than listen to myself."

"Did you think I would reproach you? Did you think I would add that? I, too, was blindfolded," he said, looking away from her.

His voice was the voice of frozen tears.

They stood silent, his suffering beating at her heart. She knew that a word from her would unlock flood-gates.

And a great wave of longing rose in Felicia, engulfing her utterly, so that she knew for some moments that seemed eternal nothing but its thunder and its restlessness. She had already seen in herself, in her love for Maurice, this capacity for recklessness, and now a deeper tumult roared in her ears. For this was the man she loved. Through mistakes and misery they had found each other. Why not fall upon his neck and shut her eyes to all that distant world? Why not cry out to him, Take me away? His strength would never lift a finger to tempt her weakness; but was there not in him a new and beautiful weakness that would not resist the appeal of her strength, her courage? Would appeal not be courageous? To see that weakness in him was a craving that shook her through and through as she stood there with her fixed, contemplative face.

She closed her eyes, dazzled by the thought, and it was as if the wave echoed far above her head, and in the sudden stillness of its depths she knew them black and dangerous.

But in that moment of deep struggle it was not the thought of danger or of duty that gave her strength to strike upward to the air. It was the thought of Geoffrey and of the ruin that such an abandonment would make in his life. More than the lurid courage to repudiate safety and the world's wise barriers for herself, was her refusal to burden him with a defiant happiness.

She could not distinguish her weakness from her strength, nor know which had tempted and which saved her. She knew only her love for Geoffrey; a love that at the crucial moment seemed a long, strong stroke that sent her upward, up to the air again. It was a leaden waste of water she rose to; a sad, colourless sky above; but there was a radiance in its whiteness. Her soul was half fainting, but she knew that her lassitude was that of victory. And all the time the surface woman of custom and control kept her look of contemplative solemnity.

Such victory made all lesser struggle easy. She merely looked her incomprehension when she heard Geoffrey saying--

"And now I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I still want you to go back to Maurice."

His voice told her that he, too, had been engulfed; that he, too, had struggled; that love of her had given him strength to win his victory, and then, in its light, to think; think clearly. But his thought made a fog about her. She could only gaze in wonder. "Nothing is really changed," said Geoffrey, who, his hand still on the back of her empty chair, had curiously the expression of an orator determined to convince, hardly stooping to persuasion. "You and I are parted. He needs you as much as ever, and you, Felicia, need him more than ever, his claim on you, I mean, his dependence, the burden that it must take all your time and all your energy to carry. I must hurt you with the truth--only I believe you have seen it, as I have. It's a choice between taking up your old life--and, I am sure of it, Felicia, making a tremendously good thing out of it--or living the new life I described to you--the life of the flower in the vase on the mantelpiece--a life of constant danger. For you--I know your strength; but could it keep me from you, year in and year out, do you suppose, if there were no barriers between us, no actual barriers of everyday life and everyday obligations? For myself--I would die for you, as you know; but to live without you--seeing you drifting--alone--in a sadness worse than any suffering--? I know that the time would come when I would ask you to chuck everything for my sake--for your own I'd put it, too:--Felicia--for my sake--if I asked you as I could--you would do it; and you know as well as I do that that sort of chucking means failure all round. You wouldn't be the growing flower; you wouldn't be the cut flower in the vase"--his face, white in its intentness, grew hard as his mind flashed to the similes that would strip all illusion from her; "you would be like those snowdrops that I carry here--on my heart;--on my heart for ever, but crushed, shrivelled, dead." He had seen his weakness as she had not seen her own. She saw now, and as he had wished, without illusions.

"But go back to him!" she said, closing her eyes and shuddering from the cup he held out to her.

"He loves you. He needs you."

"Go back from fear?--fear of you?--of myself?"

"Turn from that thought then. Don't let it be a question of you or me. Go back from pity, and because you loved him; because you are his wife."

"But after that letter!"

"Is a person's moral deficiency to warrant the breaking of such a bond? If your mother had done something horrible would you be justified in disowning her?"

"Oh--a mother!" Felicia's tears ran down.

"Remember, I wouldn't urge--I wouldn't ask you to fear me or pity him unless I knew he loved you. Unless he had that claim I would say that you were right, altogether right, in cutting him away from your life. Felicia, it's his love, perhaps, his helpless, piteous love for you, that makes the barrier that holds me from you now--my memory of his face--his voice--when he said that you were his life--that he would die without you. He thanked me for his happiness--you and I had 'made him.' He said: 'You shall never regret it--so help me, God.' Felicia, you have given him his soul. You must not rob him of it."

"Geoffrey! Geoffrey!" she said, pressing her hands against her eyes--for his words flooded her mind with memories that came with the intolerable pain of life, after long swooning, stealing into crushed arteries, wrenched and broken limbs--"I have given him no soul. He has found his soul through me, perhaps, but I can't rob him of it."

"You can stifle it, make it speechless, useless. Ah, Felicia, you do pity him. And you must--you must pity him--and forgive him."

"How could we go on," she whispered, "after my letter to him? after he knows?"

"He doesn't return till to-morrow, you said? He has not read it yet. Besides, let him know the facts--but the facts from yourself. Tell him. Spare him the letter. It was a terrible letter, my dearest, dearest," said Geoffrey, with the deep, quiet assurance of safety.

"After his to her!"

"You wanted to hurt. You meant to drive the dagger in up to the hilt. Cruel, dear, cruel. Save him before he gets it. Say it to him, if you will; let him have it straight; but don't let him read it--alone. Poor old Maurice!" Geoffrey added.

The words, his comment on them, the "poor old Maurice!" that seemed a final summing, thrilled through her, and with the thrill flashed suddenly before her a vision of Maurice--a piteous Maurice. The hatred of her own written words smote upon her as she saw his face of terror reading them. He had betrayed her; he had lied and been a coward; but she knew, and she seemed to have forgotten it for so long, that his life was hers, that it was a new life, that he indeed loved her, and that bereft of her he could not recover. A distorting mist melted from her seeing of him, and as it melted she heard Geoffrey--so far away it seemed--saying, "Can you really bear to think of his reading that letter--alone?"

She went towards him--there was now no longer any fear in his nearness. He pushed the chair to the fire, and she sank into it sobbing.

Poor, poor Maurice. Yes, in that final, comprehending pity was the truth. Geoffrey was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder as she wept. How different this from the rapture of abandonment that had called to her--to him. What had he not conquered in himself--and her--to do this great thing for her?--to save not only her, but through her, Maurice?

But, though he had conquered, she felt broken.

"Life is so long, Geoffrey."

He did not reply. She knew that he, too, was looking down that vista of long years where they must walk apart.

"And life--founded on pity----"

"More will come. Something like a mother's love."

She knew that he spoke the truth. That vision of Maurice's terror-stricken face--reading her letter--had stabbed to more than pity. The protecting passion that had flung itself between him and the reading had in it a deeper quality. She could not analyze the fiercely defensive tenderness. Presently, when her tears were over, and his arms still around her, they were looking silently into the fire, she said, "I won't disappoint you, Geoffrey."

He hid his face against hers. She felt that his cheek was wet.

For a dizzy moment a greater pity, a fiercer tenderness, rose within her, a passion far other than the maternal passion that was to take her back to Maurice.

His cheek was wet; she clasped him in her arms.

And as they clung together, both felt the pendulum-swing of human emotion that from very excess of height plunges into abysses, the dark of unknown depths. They had not escaped the wrench with fundamental things, the swinging stupor of ecstasy and anguish. Tearless now, and in silence, they clung and kissed each other.

The pendulum swung in natures steadied by conflict; the plunging moment came, went, and, without any conscious volition, left them shuddering from the final and now inevitable victory, but looking again down the long vista. It was mechanically that Geoffrey unlocked his arms, rose, and moved away.

Her little travelling clock ticked, eagerly it seemed, on the mantelpiece.

"Just half-past three," said Geoffrey.

Felicia went to the window.

"The rain has stopped," she said. "We can walk to the station in less than an hour."

Geoffrey, his hand on the mantelpiece, looked into the fire. "Don't you want something to eat? Some tea?"

"No; do you?"

"No, thanks."

"I will put on my hat and coat; I will be only a moment." She went to the door while Geoffrey said--

"We can catch the fast afternoon train. We shall be in London by six."