solicitudes, forgetful of fear and sorrow.
The recognition came with a sinking pang. Reluctantly, unwillingly, her
mind was forced back to contemplate the catastrophe that had befallen
her. He was her judge, her enemy: yet, on this dismal day, how she
missed him. She leaned her head against the window-frame and the tears
fell and fell.

If he were there, could she not go to him and take his hand and say
that, whatever the deep wounds they had dealt each other, they needed
each other too much to be apart. Could she not ask him to take her back,
to forgive her, to love her? Ah--there full memory rushed in. Her heart
seemed to pant and gasp in the sudden coil. Take him back? When it was
her steady fear as well as her sudden anger that had banished him, he
thought he loved her, but that was because he did not know and it was
the anger rather than the love of Augustine's last words that came to
her. He loved her because he believed her good, and that imaginary
goodness cast a shadow on her husband. To believe her good Augustine had
been forced to believe evil of the man she loved and to whom they both
owed everything.

He had said that he was shut out from her heart, and it was true, and
her heart broke in seeing it. But it was by more than the sacred love
for her husband that her child was shut out. Her past, her guilt, was
with her and stood as a barrier between them. She was separated from him
for ever. And, looking round the room, suddenly terrified, it seemed to
her that Augustine was dead and that she was utterly alone.

VIII

She did not write to Augustine for some days. There seemed nothing that
she could say. To say that she forgave him might seem to put aside too
easily the deep wrong he had done her and her husband; to say that she
longed to see him and that, in spite of all, her heart was his, seemed
to make deeper the chasm of falseness between them.

The rain fell during all these days. Sometimes a pale evening sunset
would light the western horizon under lifted clouds and she could walk
out and up and down the paths, among her sodden rose-trees, or down into
the wet, dark woods. Sometimes at night she saw a melancholy star
shining here and there in the vaporous sky. But in the morning the grey
sheet dropped once more between her and the outer world, and the sound
of the steady drip and beat was like an outer echo to her inner
wretchedness.

It was on the fourth day that wretchedness turned to b