e must go down. Seymour had already
been waiting some time, ten minutes or more. He must be wondering
why she did not come. He was not the sort of man one cares to keep
waiting--although he had waited many years scarcely daring to hope for
something he longed for. She thought of his marvellous happiness, his
wonderful surprise, if she did what she meant--or did she mean it--to
do. Surely it would be a splendid thing to bring such a flash of
radiance into a life of twilight. Does happiness come from making others
happy? If so, then--She must go down.

"I will do it!" she said to herself. "Merely his happiness will be
enough reward."

And she went towards the door. But as she did so her apprehension grew
till her body tingled with it. A strange sensation of being physically
unwell came upon her. She shrank, as if physically, from the clutching
hands of the irrevocable. If in a hurry, driven by her demon, she were
to say the words she had in her mind there would be no going back. She
would never dare to unsay them. She knew that. But that was just the
great advantage she surely was seeking--an irrevocable safety from
herself, a safety she would never be able to get away from, break out
of.

In a prison there is safety from all the dangers and horrors of the
world outside the prison. But what a desperate love of the state she now
called freedom burned within her! Freedom for what, though? She knew and
felt as if her soul were slowly reddening. It was monstrous that thought
of hers. Yet she could not help having it. It was surely not her fault
if she had it. Was she a sort of monster unlike all other women of her
age? Or did many of them, too, have such thoughts?

She must go down. And she went to the door and opened it. And directly
she saw the landing outside and the descending staircase she knew that
she had not yet decided, that she could not decide till she had looked
at Seymour once more, looked at him with the almost terrible eyes of
the deeply experienced woman who can no longer decide a thing swiftly in
ignorance.

"I shall do it," she said to herself. "But I must be reasonable, and
there is no reason why I should force myself to make up my mind finally
up here. I have sent for Seymour and I know why. When I see him, when I
am with him, I shall do what I intended to do when I asked him to come."

She shut her bedroom door and began to go downstairs, and as she went
she imagined Seymour settled in that house w