pected to be so long away from any communication with the
outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken conscience took
him back to England. He found a second William Porphyry in the world,
dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly triumphant and passionate,
the Madonna enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no emotion.
William Porphyry was very red and ugly and protesting, feeble and
aggressive, a matter for a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him
and dispel a dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned again.

For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
familiar flatteries of her love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda
said, and wiser, so that she was afraid of him....

And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her side.
"We have both had our adventures," she said, which struck him as an odd
phrase.

It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those
conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so
clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind. She had
absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed
to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives. It
had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her. And upon his
interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a year. She
was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled her during their
first settlement in London. She wanted a joint life in the social world
of London, she demanded his presence, his attention, the daily practical
evidences of love. It was all very well for him to be away when the
child was coming, but now everything was different. Now he must stay by
her.

This time he argued no case. These issues he had settled for ever. Even
an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began
with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. Behind these things
now was India. The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold
upon his imagination. He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that
picture by a vision of the east....

He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington. The young man
displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But
he seemed to have something on his mind. And Amanda said not a word
about him. He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt....

And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these
two lar