nselfish, high-minded. He had taken the woman he
loved better than himself into his life and he would keep the promise
he had voluntarily made her unless she released him. He would conquer
and kill the best part of him.

Anne had no apprehension of his physical death. No doubt his mere
bodily well-being would go on increasing after the struggle was over;
but what of his maimed and thwarted intellect, the mind-emptiness of a
man who had known the greatest of mortal joys, mental creation? What
of the haunting knowledge throughout a possibly long life, of having
deliberately done a divine gift to death?

Anne felt like a murderer herself. She went suddenly out into the
gallery, and stood for a moment with her arms rigidly upraised to the
black rolling sky. There was no response in the fury of the rain that
drowned her face, and compelled her to bend her head.

The great banana tree was whipping about like an alive creature in
agony. She could hardly keep her breath, and the salt spray flew over
the roof and touched her lips. The elements roared and shrieked and
whistled in a colossal orchestra, and above them she could hear that
most uncanny of all sounds in a West Indian storm, the rattling of the
hard seeds of the giant tree in their brittle pods.

But the noise inflamed rather than benumbed the tumult in her soul.
Little as her husband suspected it, the gossip of Bath House and her
own imagination had enabled her to realise the being he was and the
life he led when transformed by drink. She had long since put those
images from her, but they peopled the gallery to-night. And they were
hideous, loathsome. She felt old and dry and wrecked and polluted in
the mere contemplation of them. Could even her love survive such
an ordeal? Or life? She had experienced mortal happiness to an
extraordinary degree. Were she firm now, she might know it again--not
to the same degree--doubtless not--but all that a mere mortal had any
right to expect after that one foretaste of immortality. She had her
rights. Her life could be made monstrous for a time; then she would
go back and live on through countless years by the North Sea. For
did Warner return to the habits of the years that had preceded their
marriage his extinction would be a mere question of time. He might
survive this work, and another; for he would never return to this
battle between his love for her and for a love older still and far
more deeply ingrained. A year or two an