n that playing.

And again that voice exulting in the study:

"Lilla? Oh, where are you?"

"Come away from here," she muttered, giving Lawrence an awful stare,
snatching at his sleeve, dragging him after her across the room, her
feet as heavy as if fleeing through a nightmare. Now, straining at his
arm, she was in the wainscotted hall before the stone mantelpiece that
bore up the defiant knight. Now she reached the fernery. The palms
leaped back into place behind them as she collapsed upon the red
cushions of the settee.

He stood watching her as before, erect, breathing, alive, even though
he lay smashed in the depths of that chasm which she had prevented him
from clearing.

CHAPTER XLV

"And your idea is," Lawrence inquired calmly, "that he mustn't know at
all?" She continued to weep in silence, the tears running quickly down
her cheeks and falling like brilliants upon the fur edging of her house
gown. He added, "I merely mean, is it practicable?"

Incoherently she started to tell the whole story over again.

"But how can I make you understand? My wits are gone. He was utterly
helpless, done for, you might as well say dead. All the life blazing
and throbbing round him--and round me, too; for I was as good as dead
also. Two dead people meeting and trying to find their way back,
through each other, to some sort of life. But he didn't know that he
was helping me; that is my secret. Yet it wasn't all selfishness with
me. In the end I was persuaded just by pity. Have you seen a sick
animal looking at you pleadingly? Pity is a monster! First one
tentacle, then another, and finally one is pulled under and devoured.
One should never feel pity. But you were gone."

She pressed her fingers to her temples, and closed her eyes.

"Don't you know this will kill him?" she asked. "But how could you
know that? It's so, all the same. It's just I who have kept him
alive. It's just by holding on to me that he's held on to life."

She gave a cry:

"Ah! This is too much! What am I to do?"

She writhed amid the red cushions of the settee till he commanded
sternly:

"Calm yourself. It's time we began to talk sensibly."

She sat still, looking at him in terror.

"Yes," she whispered.

His erect immobility, his emotional self-containment, recalled to her,
by contrast, the feebleness and helplessness that had lured her into
this trap. Once more she perceived in this man the refuge that her
f