the dances and country
parties of a season. And, suddenly, the world changed. It was not dawn
and it was not daylight; it was a wild and beautiful illumination like
torches at night. She knew herself loved and her own being became
precious and enchanting to her. The presence of the man who loved her
filled her with rapture and fear. Their recognition was swift. He told
her things about herself that she had never dreamed of and as he told
them she felt them to be true.

To other people Paul Quentin did not speak much of Lady Channice. He
early saw that he would need to be discreet. One day at Lady Elliston's
her beauty was in question and someone said that she was too pale and
too impassive; and at that Quentin, smiling a little fiercely, remarked
that she was as pale as a cowslip and as impassive as a young Madonna;
the words pictured her; her fresh Spring-like quality, and the peace, as
of some noble power not yet roused.

In looking back, it was strange and terrible to Lady Channice to see how
little she had really known this man. Their meetings, their talks
together, were like the torchlight that flashed and wavered and only
fitfully revealed. From the first she had listened, had assented, to
everything he said, hanging upon his words and his looks and living
afterward in the memory of them. And in memory their significance seemed
so to grow that when they next met they found themselves far nearer than
the words had left them.

All her young reserves and dignities had been penetrated and dissolved.
It was always themselves he talked of, but, from that centre, he waved
the torch about a transformed earth and showed her a world of thought
and of art that she had never seen before. No murmur of it had reached
the deanery; to her husband and the people he lived among it was a mere
spectacle; Quentin made that bright, ardent world real to her, and
serious. He gave her books to read; he took her to hear music; he showed
her the pictures, the statues, the gems and porcelains that she had
before accepted as part of the background of life hardly seeing them.
From being the background of life they became, in a sense, suddenly its
object. But not their object--not his and hers,--though they talked of
them, looked, listened and understood. To Quentin and Amabel this beauty
was still background, and in the centre, at the core of things, were
their two selves and the ecstasy of feeling that exalted and terrified.
All else in l