d still a
moment, listening, and at last she heard Caspar Goodwood walk out of
the sitting-room and close the door behind him. She stood still a little
longer, and then, by an irresistible impulse, dropped on her knees
before her bed and hid her face in her arms.

CHAPTER XVII

She was not praying; she was trembling--trembling all over. Vibration
was easy to her, was in fact too constant with her, and she found
herself now humming like a smitten harp. She only asked, however, to put
on the cover, to case herself again in brown holland, but she wished to
resist her excitement, and the attitude of devotion, which she kept for
some time, seemed to help her to be still. She intensely rejoiced that
Caspar Goodwood was gone; there was something in having thus got rid of
him that was like the payment, for a stamped receipt, of some debt
too long on her mind. As she felt the glad relief she bowed her head a
little lower; the sense was there, throbbing in her heart; it was part
of her emotion, but it was a thing to be ashamed of--it was profane and
out of place. It was not for some ten minutes that she rose from her
knees, and even when she came back to the sitting-room her tremor had
not quite subsided. It had had, verily, two causes: part of it was to be
accounted for by her long discussion with Mr. Goodwood, but it might be
feared that the rest was simply the enjoyment she found in the exercise
of her power. She sat down in the same chair again and took up her book,
but without going through the form of opening the volume. She leaned
back, with that low, soft, aspiring murmur with which she often
uttered her response to accidents of which the brighter side was not
superficially obvious, and yielded to the satisfaction of having refused
two ardent suitors in a fortnight. That love of liberty of which she
had given Caspar Goodwood so bold a sketch was as yet almost exclusively
theoretic; she had not been able to indulge it on a large scale. But it
appeared to her she had done something; she had tasted of the delight,
if not of battle, at least of victory; she had done what was truest to
her plan. In the glow of this consciousness the image of Mr. Goodwood
taking his sad walk homeward through the dingy town presented itself
with a certain reproachful force; so that, as at the same moment the
door of the room was opened, she rose with an apprehension that he
had come back. But it was only Henrietta Stackpole returning from h