ightness, of her husband's eyes, that never judged, never grew hard or
fierce or remote from human tolerance, a strange repulsion from her son
rose in her. Cold, fierce, righteous boy; cold, heartless theories that
one throb of human emotion would rightly shatter;--the thought was
almost like an echo of Paul Quentin speaking in her heart to comfort
her. She sprang up: that was indeed the last turn of horror. If she was
not to faint she must not think. Action alone could dispel the whirling
mist where she did not know herself.

She went down to the dining-room. Augustine stood looking out of the
window. "Do come and see this delightful swallow," he said: "he's
skimming over and over the lawn."

She felt that she could not look at the swallow. She could only walk to
her chair and sink down on it. Augustine repelled her with his
cheerfulness, his trivial satisfactions. How could he not know that she
was in torment and that he had plunged her there. This involuntary
injustice to him was, she saw again, veritably crazed.

She poured herself out water and said in a voice that surprised
herself:--"Very delightful, I am sure; but come and have your lunch. I
am hungry."

"And how pale you are," said Augustine, going to his place. "We stayed
out too long. You got chilled." He looked at her with the solicitude
that was like a brother's--or a doctor's. That jarred upon her racked
nerves, too.

"Yes; I am cold," she said.

She took food upon her plate and pretended to eat. Augustine, she
guessed, must already feel the change in her. He must see that she only
pretended. But he said nothing more. His tact was a further turn to the
knot of her sudden misery.

* * * * *

Augustine was with her in the drawing-room when she heard the wheels of
the station-fly grinding on the gravel drive; they sounded very faintly
in the drawing-room, but, from years of listening, her hearing had grown
very acute.

She could never meet her husband without an emotion that betrayed itself
in pallor and trembling and today the emotion was so marked that
Augustine's presence was at once a safeguard and an anxiety; before
Augustine she could be sure of not breaking down, not bursting into
tears of mingled gladness and wretchedness, but though he would keep her
from betraying too much to Sir Hugh, would she not betray too much to
him? He was reading a review and laid it down as the door opened: she
could only hope that he noti